Peace and Tranquility at a Balinese Hindu Temple

January 2020

Bali is a Hindu island in Indonesia, it is truly a spectacular little island with its mystical spirit, it resembles what someone may call a true tropical utopia in this forever closing world.

Indonesia, is an Islamic country, a few days before my adventure to the Hindu island of Bali, I could hear the call for pray resonating around the intimidating city of Jakarta, the capital. (Jakarta is on the island of Java).

I was travelling with my wife and two friends from Taiwan, Chris and Megan. We were going to spend the day looking around the different sites that Bali had to offer. On our list was a Hindu temple, though I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the temple, it was one of the highlights of the trip.

Before entering the temple, we had to change our appearance, we were made to wear this kilt like clothing to cover our scrawny legs, instead of our holiday shorts.

The architectural designs around the temple were astounding, the amount of work that would have gone into each of the stone art would have taken the carver a fair amount of time. The temple had a few towers in a form of a mini pyramid, the grey and orange bricks stood out immensely against the blue Bali sky.

Bali, being a popular tourist destination for Indonesians, Chinese and Australians, takes away any feeling of spirituality that one may be expecting to feel when visiting a Hindu temple, and for me that kind of spoilt the whole experience as a whole. Every time I tried to take a good shot, I had to navigate my camera around the other snapping tourists. I guess if you had immense photo editing skills (which I do not), you could just edit everyone else out.

I believe that the temple is for the Hindu god known as Sanghuang Widhi or Acintya. Unlike Indian Hindus that have thousands of gods for many occasions, Balinese Hindus only really worship this one god.

I got this image from www.gedeaustana.com

A Little Bit of Religious History

Sanghuang Widhi is the Supreme God of Indonesian Hinduism.

Sanghuang Widhi means emptiness and is considered the origin of the Universe and all the other divinities

emanate from him.

When Islam began to spread in Indonesia, especially in the neighbouring island of Java, Bali was introduced to Sanghuang Widhi which was the result of the Hindu reformation movement In the 16th century. This was led by Dang Hyang Nirartha, who built the temples in Bali. He added the Padmasana shrines to every temple he visited.

I got this image from a Facebook page called Dang Hyang Nirartha.

Here are some of the pictures I managed to take without anybody else in them. I personally love the design, everywhere you look is like a work of art.