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C H A P T E R T H R E E The Purposes of Pura Désa Batuan Why were the stone carvings of Pura Désa Batuan made the way they were? Why were some of the walls and gateways so elaborately decorated that I was easily led to label the works in the temple “art”? What purposes were fulfilled by the manner of their making? What were the members of the temple doing within it, and how did these activities affect the making and arranging of the temple’s carvings? Answers would be background information that is crucial to any interpretation of their meanings or evaluation of their appeal. Understanding such activities and the indigenous ideas associated with them should enable me and my readers to avoid, at least partially, imposing our own, perhaps farfetched, interpretations on Balinese artifacts, activities , and events. To find out what were the culturally available ideas with which the people of Batuan make sense of the temple’s form and carvings is to explore what we call its religious purposes and uses. But an adequate history and ethnography of Balinese ritual practices and ideas has yet to be written.1 There is an urgent need for further research by Balinese scholars and theologians, by those who have the personal involvement, experience, and linguistic familiarity to produce authoritative reports and conceptualizations. To make such studies more diffi- cult, Balinese everyday religious life has been, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, undergoing important changes that made retrospective comments about temple forms and carvings anachronistic. These are contested matters. Not all Balinese agree on the nature of the beings who are worshiped in the temple and on the purpose of that worship. During the period of my field research, the 1980s, some people in Bali were developing new ideas about their temple practices . It is likely, however, that throughout Bali’s history there never has been a settled orthodox doctrine accepted by everyone. Although Bali has entertained a variety of Hinduisms and Buddhisms over the centuries, none of these major religions has a strong institutional framework for delineating and enforcing orthodoxy. Besides that, the equally strong indigenous practice of communicating directly with “gods” and “demons” and their like constantly undermines efforts after orthodoxy and uniformity of belief. For these reasons, any systematized account of “the” Balinese religion is suspect. Since this book is about the “art” of temple construction and decoration, I focus on the grounds upon which the makers and remodelers of the temple made their creative decisions. A major concern in this chapter is therefore about what functional requirements their ceremonies entail, needs that directly affect the architecture and spatial layout of the temple. Another concern is what its ritual activities tell us about the nature of the audience the planners and artisans had in mind as they worked on the temple decorations . Of course, they might have aimed to please their fellow villagers, and, perhaps, people from nearby settlements , local royalty, government officials, or even tourists. The argument of this book is that the primary audience toward whom the artistry and imagination was directed was, and is, the gods and demons of Batuan. Who the intended audience is sets up a cultural interpretive frame that encompasses all others, that determines the appropriateness of various choices of form, subject matter, style, and the like. Who the gods and demons of Pura Désa Batuan are and what their tastes are becomes a pressing topic for research. The English phrase “gods and demons” is a poor term to cover the beings with whom Balinese interact within the temple. The closest to a general word for them is “niskala,” which means, roughly, “invisible and intangible.” This term is not a noun, however, but more like an adjective, indicating an important characteristic of such beings, who might then be referred to as sané niskala (“those who are invisible” or “the niskala beings ”). The phrase “niskala beings” can be used to refer to everyone from the highest deities (Siwa, Wisnu, and the like) down through local gods (the gods of Pura Désa Batuan) to the littlest imps and spooks that inhabit small streams and clumps of bushes. In this chapter, I present my current understanding of the ritual activities that are conducted in and around Pura Désa Batuan and the implications they carry for the nature of its deities and for the character of the temple. My account...

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