Life in a Hindu Village

Musicians at clothing shop in Menyali Village

I did not want to let the story of my time in Bali pass without saying a little about the daily life of a Hindu village of Bali.  I presume that what I experienced with Pak Budasi, a very modern man with a Ph.D. from the premier Gadja Mada University in Yogyakarta, is still fairly close to what is typical.  To put it simply, the life of the Hindu village revolves around ceremony.  While for Muslims, prayer is often but not always in the mosque (you can get your prayer rug out anywhere and pray), for the Hindu it takes the form of offerings gathered and bought from flowers and fruits and arranged in little bamboo leaf dishes.  These offerings are placed everywhere, and we saw them in front of almost every shop in Ubud.  They ask the spirits for blessings of whatever endeavor is at hand, whether selling or farming or just living.  When we stopped at a Hindu Shiva temple, the primary god for Balinese of the many within the Hindu pantheon, we visited a woman whose task was to arrange these tasteful offerings for sale in temple ceremonies. 

  Just after we arrived at the Budasi family compound, we were invited to witness the annual blessing of the land belonging to this family, and so we trekked up a rather long hill passing the trees and plants planted to renew the land, and then watched while Pak Budasi and his wife made their dinner plate-size offerings.
  At the end of our stay, we were busy packing but got a glimpse of the blessing of a new motorcycle, with the priest saying prayers over the new bike amid several offerings.  Our visit to the family "sangha," the place where a number of shrines sit around the outskirts of a field and where once offerings have been made it is hoped that the ancestors of the family, those who have died and been cremated, will have their spirits descend and take up residence to bless and guard the family even more.  All of this sounded beautiful and "connected" to me, the living with the dead, the everyday with the world of spirit, the ordinary with the extraordinary.  To enter even more fully into the life of a Hindu village, visit the blog of my fellow Fulbrighter's wife, Judith Fox, who has lived for several months in a village to the south of Ubud, Batubulan:   http://macambali.wordpress.com/.