Religion in Bali by C. Hooykaas

2 First Acquaintance [18]
Using one's eyes in Bali one cannot fail to notice that every day crossroads are adorned with
plaited offerings on the soil, invariably garnished with flowers or petals in bright colors. They
are destined for the powers and forces of the netherworld; every layman and each of the six kinds
of priests is conversant with the idea: do ut abeas, 'I give with the intention that thou mayest
retire (and not harm us)'. This fundamental idea is demonstrated here and before the gates of
dwellings, but then only on some definite days.
These crossroads, more often than not, are provided with awe inspiring sculptures of demoniac
beings (g 3, g 4), sometimes the goddess Durga. The leading thought again is their warding off of
the spirits of evil. One should know that Kala, the God of Evil, at mid day takes the crossroads as
his hunting field.
Next fact that must strike anybody after having moved around only a few miles is the great
number of temples [36]. One recognizes them immediately: whereas private court yards are
walled in to prevent eyes to roam over them, the two or three consecutive courts of a temple have
lower walls with higher gates leading to higher buildings, some of them real pagodas and bearing
the Indian name méru. These gates, called chandi bentar, 'split chandi', resembling a tall building
lengthwise cut into two equal halves, immediately draws the attention due to their elaborate
sculpture and their beautiful wooden door wings. The fatal earthquake of 1917 destroyed or
damaged seriously 2431 of Bali's temples on only one ninth of the island's surface, so that some
>20.000 of them may exist, on a population then of about a million [2, 3]. This baffling number
of an average of only fifty people available for the upkeep of a temple is the more serious
because it originates from official figures and is given by Dr. R. Goris who makes a definite
difference between a temple and a more humble common place of worship in the fields (a, b 1,
k5). On top of that one should be aware that the stone used for the construction of any building is
invariably of the easily accessible but extremely 'soft' quality that the island produces, paras. The
task of the men is not infrequently that of repairing damaged walls and buildings. The command
of a village god, consulted because of an illness or disaster, through his medium in a state of