Sang Hyang Widhi

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Above the tallest shrine in a Balinese temple courtyard, past the stone turtle at its foot and the two serpents coiled around the turtle, past the tiers of carving that climb like a tower, there is a high seat. It is empty. No image sits in it, and by design none ever will. The chair is cut and gilded and kept clean, dressed on feast days in cloth and flowers, and it holds nothing a person can see. It is built for a god who cannot be pictured — only named. The name most often given to that god is Acintya, Sanskrit for the Inconceivable, the one that cannot be thought. The seat is left open because a form would be a lie.

That empty chair is the visible sign of Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the supreme godhead of Balinese Hinduism: formless, eternal, beyond the reach of the mind, the single source from which the whole ordered cosmos and every one of its gods pours out. Everything else in the courtyard — the working deities addressed at their own shrines, the offerings laid on the pavement at dawn, the priests, the holy water — turns on that unoccupied seat and the unmanifest power it marks.

A name assembled from three tongues

The name is a compound, and each piece carries its own history. Sang Hyang is Old Javanese, an honorific reserved for a sacred, divine being — the same title set before Siwa’s name, or the sun’s. Widhi is a word the Balinese carried a long way: from senses of fate, luck and knowledge toward the fuller meaning of law, order, cosmic balance. Wasa comes through Old Javanese waśa from the Sanskrit vaśa, power or dominion. Read straight across, the three make something like “the divine ordering power,” and the tradition renders the whole more plainly still as the One Supreme God, per the survey in the reference account of Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa. Beside it stand two other names for the same reality: Sang Hyang Tunggal, the One and Only, where tunggal is simply “one”; and, above all, Acintya, the Inconceivable — the name that concedes at the outset that the thing named cannot be held in a thought.

In devotion the name is rarely spoken bare. It takes the honorific Ida before it — Ida Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, a form roughly like “the Lord” set ahead of “the divine ordering power” — a layering of respect on respect that is itself a small argument about distance: the more transcendent the god, the more titles the mouth stacks in front of the word. The proliferation of names works the same way. Tunggal, Widhi, Acintya are not three gods, nor even three doctrines, but three approaches to a single reality that no one approach can bound — the One, the Order, the Inconceivable, each conceding what the others leave out.

This god reaches the visible record chiefly through two channels. The first is the pedanda, the Brahmana high priests, and the palm-leaf lontar manuscripts of tattwa — the theology — that they read and copied and passed down: the empty seat has a literature behind it, and the account of the supreme god’s throne is attributed to a lontar text, the Dwijendra Tattwa. A pedanda is made, not born to office alone; the priest passes through a rite of purification read as a death and rebirth, after which he may draw down the holy water and voice the mantras that carry the rites. The tattwa the pedanda guards is not a creed to be recited by the laity but a body of learned theology, and it is in that learned layer, rather than in the crowded ritual field, that the doctrine of the formless supreme has its home. The second channel is architecture. The tall shrine crowned by the empty seat is the padmasana, the lotus-throne, and it is the padmasana far more than any statue that carries Widhi into the daily life of a temple.

A padmasana in the Utama Mandala, the holiest court, of Pura Agung Blambangan — the tiered lotus-throne climbing to the empty seat kept for the formless god. Pangeran Kurchilds, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The padmasana is not primordial, and the tradition itself does not pretend it is. Its introduction into Balinese temples is attributed to a single figure: the Shaivite priest Dang Hyang Nirartha, a poet, wonderworker and advisor to rulers who came from Java in the last years of the Majapahit court, arriving in Bali around 1489 to 1492 during the reign of the Gelgel king Waturenggong. Nirartha is the ancestral founder of the island’s Shaivite pedanda line, and the reform credited to him set the empty lotus-throne at the heart of the temple as the altar of the formless supreme deity, described in the account of Dang Hyang Nirartha as the most influential reformer of Balinese Hinduism. He is remembered as the founder of shrines along the island’s edge — the sea-temple of Tanah Lot on its tidal rock, the cliff-temple of Uluwatu above the surf — and a colophon he wrote places him still alive in 1537. The point that follows is quiet and important: the visible sign of Widhi is itself dated. The empty throne entered Balinese temples in the sixteenth century. What it houses is called eternal; the house is not.

The one behind the many

Inside the tradition, Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa is the single, formless, transcendent source — eternal, ineffable, beyond thought — and everything that can be named is downstream of it. The whole ordered cosmos emanates from Widhi, and so do the gods. The Hindu Trimurti, the three great powers — Brahma who makes, Wisnu who preserves, Siwa who dissolves — are not rivals or a committee of separate deities but faces, manifestations, of the one Widhi. So too the countless local devas and the ancestral bhatara and bhatari worshiped at their own places. The many gods are the manifest workings of the One; the One is the unmanifest ground of the many.

This is the transcendent pole of the Balinese cosmos, and it is worth keeping distinct from the working gods who are addressed, by name, at their own shrines and for their own ends. Dewi Sri, the rice-mother, is present in the growing grain and the barn; Dewi Danu, goddess of the crater lakes, orders the water down through the terraces. They are met at their shrines, with their offerings, over their own domains. The drama-powers of the ritual field are another register again — the guardian Barong and the fearsome Rangda, whose contest is the balance of complementary opposites, rwa bhineda, and not a war of good against evil. Widhi is none of these and behind all of them: not a god one petitions for rain or rice, but the source from which every such god, and the rain and the rice, proceeds.

Because the source is formless, it is imagined two ways at once, and the two do not cancel. The first is Acintya as a figure. Where the Inconceivable is given a body at all, it is a slender naked man ringed in flame, hands raised, the nakedness read as pure consciousness — a state beyond attachment to the senses — and the fire as the burning of that consciousness. Acintya is associated with Surya, the sun: the divine cannot be looked at directly, the account of Acintya explains, any more than the eye can rest on the sun at noon, and the blinding light is itself the image of the incomprehensibility of God.

Acintya, ‘the Inconceivable’ — the supreme god given a rare human form, the flames read as pure consciousness, the figure associated with Surya the sun. PHGCOM, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The second imagining is sheer absence: the empty high seat atop the padmasana, a stone chair left unoccupied because the formless cannot be housed in an image. The summit of the throne is often marked instead with a small gilded Acintya or a solar swastika — a sign that points, rather than a portrait that claims. The padmasana below carries the weight of the whole cosmos in its carving. At its base the world-turtle Bedawang Nala bears the earth, bound by two serpents, Anantaboga and Basuki, whose coils hold the frame steady; the shrine rises through its ordered tiers to the seat at the top. It is read as the throne — the stana — of Sang Hyang Widhi and as an image of the entire universe, the Bhuana Agung, the great world. The god is enthroned above the cosmos it emanates, and the throne is left empty so that no one mistakes a carving for the god.

Widhi is reached, in practice, by voice and by water. The syllable Om stands at the head of the daily Tri Sandhya prayer and in the Kramaning Sembah sequence of salutations, invoking the essence of the supreme reality much as Om invokes Brahman in the Hinduism of India. And holy water — tirtha — carries the divine power into every act of worship, so completely that the whole tradition is called Agama Tirtha, the religion of holy water. The spring-temple of Pura Tirta Empul is one place that water is gathered; but tirtha, blessed and sprinkled, runs through every rite on the island. Here the two truths of the system sit side by side without strain. The one supreme, formless God is professed; and around the profession stands a dense pluralism of many gods, of offerings — the woven canang, the heaped banten — and of shrines beyond counting. To the tradition there is no contradiction in this. The many are the workings of the One.

The daily offerings make the point better than any argument. A small square of palm-leaf, a few flowers set by color, a pinch of rice, a stick of incense: the canang is laid on a shrine, a threshold, a wall at dawn, and it is directed not at Widhi in the abstract but at a particular presence in a particular place — the god of the gate, the spirit of the ground, the deva of the shrine. Yet the whole graded traffic of gifts runs, finally, back up to the empty seat, because the presence at the gate and the deva at the shrine are themselves faces of the formless source. Worship in Bali is not organized as a choice between one god and many. It is organized as a hierarchy in which the many are met where a person lives and works, and the One is enthroned, unoccupied and unseen, above them all.

A god recognized by the state

Read from the documentary side, Sang Hyang Widhi in its modern, explicitly monotheistic form is among the clearest cases in the ethnographic record of a living tradition articulating itself under political pressure — and it repays careful handling, because the reform is easy to misread in either direction. It did not invent Widhi. What it did was foreground and systematize a supreme, inconceivable source already latent in the tattwa texts and already enthroned, empty, atop the padmasana. The emphasis, not the god, is what the twentieth century sharpened.

The sharpening has a documented arc. Reformers advanced Acintya as an object of worship from the 1920s, according to the synthesis in the account of Balinese Hinduism; the theology was pressed harder in the 1950s, and for a concrete reason. Independent Indonesia was built on Pancasila, and Pancasila’s first principle is Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa — belief in one supreme God. A religion the state would recognize had to profess a single God. Balinese Hinduism, with its thronged pantheon and its offerings at a hundred shrines, did not read to the authorities as such a faith. In 1952 the Ministry of Religion classified Balinese Hindus, in effect, as people without a religion — orang yang belum beragama — and floated the island as a field for conversion, a hostile classification recorded in the account of Hinduism in Indonesia.

The response was organized and theological at once. On 14 June 1958 a joint petition of Balinese Hindus demanded state recognition of Hindu Dharma, and it led with a Sanskrit mantra chosen to answer the monotheism test directly — Om tat sat ekam eva advitiyam, the all-pervading, undivided One. The name it put forward for that One was Ida Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa. In 1959 a Hindu-Balinese section was established within the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and on 23 February 1959 Balinese leaders founded the council that would carry the case, the Parisada Dharma Hindu Bali. As its work grew from a Balinese to an all-Indonesia concern it took a national name, becoming the Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia in 1964, stressing a religious rather than a regional character. Recognition came in the early 1960s — commonly dated to 1962, when Hinduism, under the name Agama Hindu Dharma, was accepted as a state religion alongside Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism and Buddhism. The empty throne now stood inside a recognized faith.

Scholars have described this as a genuine reform rather than an invention, and they have not softened the politics of it. Michel Picard, writing on the very question of what it meant for Balinese practice to be reclassified as a “religion,” treats the episode as a search for recognition on terms set from outside, argued in his study of Balinese religion in search of recognition. The reform is sometimes glossed, in the wider literature that descends from the classic ethnographies — Miguel Covarrubias’s Island of Bali of 1937, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s Balinese Character of 1942, Clifford Geertz’s Negara of 1980 — as a long slide toward monotheism, colored by Indian Hindu reformism. But the consensus is that the slide foregrounded something already there. The inconceivable-supreme-source theology was in the tattwa and in the architecture before the Ministry ever posed its question. The reformers gave it a public grammar the modern state could accept.

That bears on a second matter that scholarship keeps carefully open: the relation of Balinese Hinduism to the Hinduism of India. It is a distinct syncretic tradition — a Shaiva-Buddhist theology woven through deep Austronesian strata of ancestor veneration and animism — and not simply a branch transplanted from the subcontinent. The mid-century reform did reach toward Indian and reformist models, in vocabulary and in argument, precisely because those models helped make the case to the state; but the reaching was strategic, and it sits on top of a religion with its own long inland history. To flatten the one into the other is to lose what the tradition is. The Balinese built this faith on their own island out of Javanese court religion and older island practice, and the pre-Majapahit villages of the Bali Aga preserve strands older still.

Today the padmasana stands in temple courtyards across Bali — from the mother-sanctuary of Besakih high on the volcano down to the smallest village pura — and in Hindu communities throughout Indonesia. Ida Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa is the standard Indonesian-Hindu name for God, spoken in schoolrooms and printed in prayer books, the reform’s theological vocabulary now fully lived. The empty seat is dressed each feast day and left, as it has been left since the sixteenth century, without an occupant. The god it is built for was never meant to be seen there. The seat marks the place where a form would go if the divine had one, and holds it open for the one that has none.

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