Pura Tirta Empul

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At the eastern end of the long tank the water is cold enough to catch the breath. A bather steps down over the stone lip into it, waist-deep, and turns to face the wall from which the spouts project — a row of carved stone mouths, each pouring a steady rope of spring water into the pool. The hands come together. The head goes fully under the first fall, the water breaking over the crown and running down the face; then the bather straightens, murmurs a prayer, cups a little of the water to the mouth, and moves one pace west to the next spout, and to the next after that. It is a procession made of single steps, a working-through rather than a wash. And near the far end the line does something that a stranger might miss: it passes two spouts by. No head goes beneath them. These are the Pancuran Cetik, the poison spouts, and the reason they are left alone is the same reason the whole passage exists. In the story that stands behind this water, the healing spring and the venom rose from the same rock — and to be made clean here is precisely to walk past the poison and leave it pouring.

The melukat purification area at Pura Tirta Empul, where bathers move beneath the row of spring-fed spouts. Anandajoti Bhikkhu, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The water that welled up

The temple takes its name from its own water. In the tenth-century copper-plate charter now called the Prasasti Manukaya, the place is written Tirta ri Air Hampul — “the water that wells up” — and that phrase, worn smooth by a thousand years of Balinese mouths, passed through Tirta Hampul to the Tirta Empul of today. The name is not a poetic gloss laid over the site after the fact; it is the site’s oldest recorded description of itself, the plain report that here, in the black sand of a spring, water comes up out of the ground.

The place is easy to find and old past finding. Tirta Empul lies in Manukaya village, in the Tampaksiring district of Gianyar Regency, about thirty-six kilometers up from Denpasar and a short drive north of Ubud, at roughly four hundred and eighty meters where the central highlands begin to fold into river gorges. One of those gorges is the Pakerisan, and the spring is its head. The temple is not perched on a height or thrust out into the sea like some of Bali’s famous sanctuaries; it sits low, in the ground, at the exact place where the water comes up — which is the whole of its reason for being there.

The charter that carries it is the firmest thing scholarship has to hold. Read from its Old-Balinese script, the Manukaya inscription is dated to the Saka year 882 — 960 CE — and issued in the name of a king of the Warmadewa house rendered as Sri Candrabhayasingha, also given as Jayasingha Warmadewa, the dynasty that ruled Bali in the centuries before the Majapahit conquest. Its text commands works on a spring and on the embankments that hold it against the annual floods, so that the water might be kept and the purification kept with it. The stone itself is weathered nearly to silence: fifteen readable lines on side A, eight on side B, much of the rest gone. It is not kept at the bathing temple. It is housed in a shrine at Pura Sakenan in Manukaya village — a local temple of that name, not the famous island sanctuary of the same title off Serangan near Denpasar — where it has stood as the community’s own record of its founding.

On the documentary reading the temple was founded around 962 CE, during the Warmadewa dynasty, around the large spring that rises here. That much is scholarly consensus. What the damaged stone cannot fix is the finer correspondence. Whether the charter’s spring and embankments are exactly the present pools, and whether the year marks a foundation or a restoration of a place already sacred, rests on lines that are in many spots no longer legible; the tradition of these dates is confident, the epigraphy less so. The historicity of the tyrant-king who stands behind the temple’s other, older story is contested in the same way — a figure of legend and chronicle rather than of the inscriptional record. These are the seams where the certainty runs out, and they should be named as seams.

Beneath the charter lies the deeper genealogy, the one the Balinese themselves tell, and it is a genealogy of the water rather than of the stonework. In the account preserved in the Lontar Usana Bali, the palm-leaf chronicle of the island’s sacred past, the spring is amerta — the elixir of life, the deathless water. It was struck from the earth by Bhatara Indra. The tyrant Mayadanawa, king of Bedahulu, had proclaimed himself a god and forbidden the worship of the true gods, and when Indra came down against him the raja poisoned the springs, so that Indra’s army, drinking, fell sick and dying on the ground. To revive them the god drove his weapon into the earth, and from the wound rose water that was not poison but its opposite — the living spring that healed the army and set them on their feet to win the war. The spring is that wound in the ground of the world. And in the temple’s inner court the lord of the living water is Wisnu as Narayana, he who moves upon the waters — so that the site’s pedigree is at once a tenth-century royal water-work on the Tukad Pakerisan, the Pakerisan River whose head this spring is, and an act of the gods older than any dynasty. Both accounts are kept. Neither is asked to defeat the other.

The spouts and the passage through them

Tirta Empul teaches through the body of the bather, moving spout to spout. The complex is ordered, like other Balinese temples, into three concentric courts: the Jaba Pura, the outer yard; the Jaba Tengah, the middle yard; and the Jeroan, the innermost. It is a design that carries the visitor inward through rising degrees of holiness, and here the water runs the other way through it. The holy spring rises not in the pools where the crowds gather but deep in the Jeroan, bubbling up through black sand behind a screen where offerings are set on the surface of a clear tank, the water so still and so clean that the sand can be seen turning in the upwelling. From there it is led outward, into the Jaba Tengah, and there it falls.

Pura Tirta Empul, the holy-spring temple in Gianyar, whose spring water is drawn out to the row of purification spouts. Saranabhi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The middle court holds two long rectangular tanks, and along their inner walls runs the row of carved stone pancuran, the spouts — roughly thirty of them across the two tanks, each a stone mouth from which the spring water falls in a clean rope into the pool below. Some are numbered by custom; some carry names and offices. There is a Pengelukatan and a Pebersihan for cleansing, and a Sudamala for the undoing of malefic residue, the loosening of what clings. The pilgrim enters at the eastern end and passes westward, spout by spout, in order: down into the cool water, hands folded, the whole head ducked beneath the fall, a prayer, a little water cupped to the lips, then a single step west to the next. The walk is not a single act repeated but a sequence — a passage through named stations, each doing its own work, the bather emerging at the far end having moved through the whole. It is a melukat, a ritual purification in the water of the spring, and Balinese Hindus perform it here, today, as a living rite of a living religion.

Two spouts, though, are not for the head, and they stand where the passage nearly ends. These are the Pancuran Cetik, the poison spouts, and they belong to Mayadanawa’s venom in the story. From the same rock that gives the amerta, the tradition holds, the poison also ran; the bather who has come the length of the tank simply passes these two by, does not duck beneath them, does not cup the water to the mouth. The poisoned source is said in the tellings to have dried up. But its spouts are kept in the row, unused, and that keeping is the point of the whole design. The amerta and the cetik, the healing and the venom, are set side by side because in this sacred world they are not two unrelated things but the paired faces of one power, and purification is not the pretense that the poison was never there. It is the passage that leaves the poison behind — the deliberate walking-past of the last two spouts, the choosing of the living water at the very place where the dead water runs from the same stone.

This is the logic of the Balinese water-temple world, and Tirta Empul is one of its great living sources. Tirta, holy water, is the medium in which the invisible is made to work: the water blessed and drawn from a source like this one carries the efficacy of the divine into every rite that uses it, so that the island’s ceremonies run, in a sense, on tirta the way its fields run on the irrigation that shares the word’s root. A spring held to be the amerta itself, welling in the inner court of a temple founded by a tenth-century king, is therefore not a curiosity but a wellhead of the sacred, a place from which holiness is literally carried away in vessels. What exactly a given group of pilgrims does at the spouts — which ones they use, in what order, under which prayers — is not one fixed thing. It is set by the desa adat, the customary village, and by the pemangku, the temple’s own priest, and it varies from community to community and from occasion to occasion; the closed detail of a guided rite is not the public record’s to give. What the public record can say is the shape: the eastern entry, the westward walk, the head under each fall, and the two spouts left running at the end.

The stone below and the palace above

The afterlife of Tirta Empul is doubled — between pilgrimage and spectacle, and between the tenth century and the Republic — and the doubling is visible in a single glance up the hillside. The temple’s own reception, first, is a matter of the ritual calendar. Balinese Hindus come year-round for melukat, and they come in dense crowds at Galungan and Kuningan, the great festival that the tradition reads as the very commemoration of the story told in the spring: Indra’s victory over Mayadanawa, the triumph of dharma over the tyrant who called himself a god. Galungan falls on the Wednesday of the eleventh week of the pawukon calendar and returns every two hundred and ten days, with Kuningan ten days after, and on the auspicious days around them the pools fill with people waiting their turn at the spouts. The holy springs of Tirta Empul are, on those days, as busy as any place on the island. This is the temple’s own life, and it is enough to make the site what it is; the fuller reckoning with Bali’s twentieth-century image and its tourist economy belongs to the account of the Balinese themselves.

Directly above the spring, on the ridge, stands the second story. After independence, President Sukarno had a state palace built here: the Istana Tampaksiring. A guest villa on the site dates from his visit of 1954, and the palace proper was designed from 1957 under the architect R.M. Soedarsono, its construction running on into the early 1960s. It is a work of modernist-Balinese design, unlike the Dutch-colonial residences that Indonesia inherited elsewhere, set on higher ground so that its main buildings look out over the temple and, beyond, toward Gunung Agung. It remains one of the Republic’s official state palaces, a place for receiving heads of state. The arrangement is worth holding still for a moment: a modern presidential retreat on the ridge, looking down on a petirtaan founded a thousand years before it, the twentieth-century state and the tenth-century spring on a single line of sight, the one above and the other below.

Since the late twentieth century a third layer has been laid over both. Tirta Empul is now among the most-visited sites in Gianyar, a fixture of the machinery that markets Bali to the world, and the sight of tourists in rented sarongs queuing at the spouts alongside praying Balinese has itself become part of the record. That crowding, and the commercialization that comes with it — the pressure of visitor numbers on a working temple, the murmured complaint that the sacred passage has become a photograph — has been criticized by Balinese commentators and by the temple’s own managers, and periodically addressed by measures that separate the tourist’s bathing from the worshiper’s or channel the crowds away from the moments of rite. The critique is recorded here as reception, not adopted as description: the temple is not a spa with a heritage, and the brand voice that would make it one is exactly what the desa adat that keeps the place has reason to resist.

The scholarly recovery, meanwhile, has run in two channels. One is the patient work on the Manukaya stone and on the Old-Balinese charters like it, the epigraphy that lets the tenth century speak at all through so much erosion. The other is the study of the Pakerisan valley as a whole — the narrow river gorge that Tirta Empul heads, clustered with water-temples and with the great rock-cut candi of Gunung Kawi a little way downstream, a monument distinct from the spring temple and not to be confused with it. That valley sits inside the wider Cultural Landscape of Bali Province, the subak system inscribed by UNESCO in 2012, whose component sites include the Subak Landscape of the Pakerisan Watershed — reckoned the oldest known irrigation system on the island. The listing is not of the temple as a monument but of the living water-culture the temple belongs to: the canals and weirs and shrines through which the highland water descends to the rice, all of it turning, as this spring turns, on the conviction that the water is holy and its keeping a sacred obligation.

So the place holds all of it at once, and stacks it vertically. On the ridge, the palace of the Republic. Below it, the pools where the tourists photograph the worshipers. Below them, the row of spouts and the westward walk that has not changed. And below everything, behind the screen in the inner court, the black sand still turning in the clear tank where the water wells up — the amerta of the story, the air hampul of the stone, the wound Indra is said to have opened in the ground, from which the healing and the poison were always meant to rise together.

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