The Bathing Place

 

Javanese Religion and the Jolotundo Temple

 

Originally published in Kabar Magazine Autumn 2010

http://kabarmag.com/magazine/2012/01/15/jolotundo-the-bathing-place/

There is a scent of incense on the damp evening air.  The temple is set into the green hillside: a facade of dark basalt fronted by a shallow pool full of slow-moving fish.  Water pours in continuous rivulets from spouts in the masonry, and on either side of the pool is a bathing tank.  Tiny freshwater crabs clamber over the stones, and black frogs squat like malevolent spirits in the dripping recesses. 

This place – the Jolotundo Temple, deep in the forest on the slopes of the 1653-meter Mount Penanggungan – is less than two hours by road from central Surabaya.  The chaos and congestion of the East Java capital seem a world away, but I am not alone in the green twilight: there are other pilgrims here.  Sitting at the edge of the pool I watch a man in a batik sarong pad over the stepping stones to a raised platform at the centre of the temple.  He settles himself cross-legged, lights an incense stick, and facing the empty plinth where the statue of some Hindu deity once stood, presses his palms in prayer.  In the bathing tanks – women to the left, men to the right – people are standing chest-deep in the cool, clear water.  Clearly something unusual is going on here; clearly Jolotundo is more than just another thousand-year-old relic of Java’s classical Hindu past.

Fresh from bathing a slim man comes and sits beside me at the water’s edge.

“My name is Muslim, and I’m a Muslim – easy to remember, right?”  He comes originally from Yogyakarta, the cradle of high Javanese culture, but is married to a Surabaya woman and has lived in the city for 15 years.

Muslim is a regular visitor to Jolotundo.  “Today I just came to bathe, but often I come to meditate, at night, from evening until morning.

“Javanese people believe there is power here.  This place is from the time of the Majapahit Empire.  We believe the remnants of Majapahit – the power, I mean – are still here.  It is a place where you can make a connection with your batin.”  Batin is a difficult word to translate precisely, meaning something along the lines of “inner spirit”.  Together with the idea of sacred power, held in places, people or objects, it is a key concept in Javanese mysticism – as are connections to Majapahit. 

In truth the Jolotundo temple predates that mightiest of Hindu Javanese kingdoms by some 300 years.  It was built in the late 10th Century under the Sanjaya Dynasty.  Inscriptions connect the place to Udayana, father of Sanjaya’s last ruler, Airlangga.  However, the Penanggungan Mountain, a perfect cone standing sentinel between the coastal plains and the volcanic hinterland, was certainly still important in the Majapahit era.  It was said to be the broken summit of the mythical Mount Meru, home of the Gods; there are other, later temples on the slopes behind Jolotundo.  Under successive dynasties the peak and its sacred places had a powerful hold, and even today, long after Hindu-Buddhist Java gave way to Islam, the idea of the bathing temple as a place of power, of sacred energy, still lingers. 

As a damp, leaden darkness falls and a cacophony of insect noise rises that power is almost palpable.  The static orange pinpricks of burning incense sticks show in the gloom and the meandering green sparks of fireflies fall like snowflakes.  More pilgrims arrive; the smell of incense thickens; naked forms, burnished in the light of oil lamps, move around the bathing tanks.

I pick my way through the dark forest to a small warung, a cafe built of bamboo in a clearing of smooth red earth below the temple.  It is owned by a man named Sembodo.

“We stay open all night; most people come to the temple at night.  The energy is best between midnight and 2 am.”  Pak Sembodo explains that the early hours of Friday morning is the best time to visit Jolotundo in any given week, but the most powerful nights of all are those of a full moon, or a Kliwon Tuesday, when the second day of the seven-day calendar coincides with the last day of the traditional five-day Javanese market week.

“On those nights it’s really busy.  You have to queue to bathe, for two hours sometimes.”

***

Observers of Java are quick to label phenomena like pilgrimage and nighttime meditation in search of sacred energy as the preserve of those who follow the traditional belief systems known as Kejawen – and are just as quick to present Kejawen as the absolute counterpoint to the Islamic orthodoxy of mosques and headscarves.

In the mid-20th Century anthropologists indentified what they saw as a distinct division between the Muslims of Java: there were the Santri, those who followed global Islamic strictures closely, and there were the others, the Kejawen or Abangan, whose faith was more closely rooted in Java itself and for who Islam, if it had any significance at all, was just one thin thread in a knot of Hinduism, Buddhism, ancestor-worship and animism.  Never the twain shall meet, the theory went, and the idea of an absolute Kejawen-Santri division in Java passed out of academia, through the pens of mainstream writers, and into public consciousness.  And the leap to the conclusion that, with concrete minarets sprouting like wet season rice shoots, Kejawen must be on the retreat was as easy as skipping over the stepping stones to the Jolotundo bathing tank.

But something about this strange, powerful place in the damp forest on the slopes of a sacred volcano seems to challenge such absolute ideas.  Plenty of the nighttime visitors pray, orthodox-fashion, in the langgar, the little Muslim prayer room, behind Pak Sembodo’s warung after they have scattered an offering of petals at the temple.  And the place is clearly the preserve of neither Javanese nor of Muslims: there are Chinese Indonesians and Balinese Hindus amongst the pilgrims.

Throughout the night a succession of men on motorbikes appear from the darkness to sit chatting and drinking coffee in the flickering lamplight of Sembodo’s warung.  Some come to bathe; others only to “refresh” after a long day in an office or campus in the cities of Sidoarjo and Surabaya.  Many of them wear dark, heavy jewels set in rings of tarnished pewter – amulets, little receptacles of the same kind of power that surrounds the temple. 

A stocky, long-haired man named Syafik talks of the fleeting glimpses he has had of jins and spirits in the forest; a student called Martin smiles as he offers me a cigarette and asks, “Am I the first Kejawen Christian you’ve met?  There are lots of us...” and a Catholic from Sidoarjo asks, “Mas Timothy, do you believe in the Other World?”  In the noisy silence of the forest, the warung floating alone in the blanketing darkness, I answer in the affirmative…

All of them agree that I should take a midnight bath at the temple, but despite the endless cups of coffee tiredness creeps up, and a brief nap on a bamboo platform behind the warung turns into a full night’s sleep...

***

The air is fresh in the morning.  Lean, wiry men with sickles and hoes over their shoulders and thin dogs at their heels stalk up the potholed road towards the rough terraces on the mountain.  The temple is deserted, only burnt-out incense sticks and scattered petals to hint at what went on in the night.  Visiting Jolotundo on a quiet weekday, you would probably assume it was just another Sunday picnic spot – with a ticket booth and a few concrete benches – and unless you asked you would never hear the story of the friend of a friend who had the baby she had long been trying for only after bathing here at midnight on a Kliwon Tuesday.  This is the kind of thing that is easy to miss in Java.

I peer down into the bathing tank.  The water shimmers in the washed-out green light of the forest and I can see that the gargoyle from which the flow emerges is a naga, the serpent of Hindu mythology often associated with rivers, rearing up with its hood half-open in two flapped ridges and its brow menacingly wrinkled.  Muslim, the pilgrim I met the previous evening, told me that the water here is the second best in the world, after that from the holy Zamzam Well in Mecca; one of the late-night coffee-drinkers at the warung said it ranked third after Zamzam and the mouth of the Ganges.

As I sit pondering this, the first of the day’s pilgrims arrive at the temple.  These people are not the amulet-wearing mystics of the hours of darkness.  The women, giggling and fluttering, are dressed in white headscarves.  The men wear tartan sarongs, embroidered collarless shirts and crocheted skullcaps.  They have the purple bruise of devout prayer on their foreheads and when I skip down over the stones to talk to them their speech is peppered with affected Alhamdulillahs.  They are, unmistakably, Santris.

Their leader is a man with a sparse tuft of beard at his chin.  His name is Safi’i.  He has completed the Haj, the ritual journey to Mecca – a pilgrimage far longer than the three kilometer trip up the bumpy road to Jolotundo from his home village on the lower slopes of the volcano.  But something still draws him here.

“The water is good.  I come here to bathe to stop myself being stressed.”

While the men splash in the right-hand tank – with, it must be said, a little less solemnity than the visitors of the previous evening – the girls flutter at the edge of the pool.

“I want to bathe,” says a young woman called Holifa; “they say the water here makes you strong.  But I’m scared it will be cold…”

***

On the one hand you could view the Jolotundo bathing temple as a place so powerful that its draw reaches out across the Kejawen-Santri divide.  But as the little orthodox party drift away like white ghosts, carrying old Aqua bottles filled with spring water, I am left with a bigger idea.  This place simply makes a mockery of arbitrary religious categorizations made by anthropologists, journalists and even by the participants.  There are no absolutes in religion in Java; there are no concrete boundaries between faiths; only tangled threads.  Sitting cross-legged under the trees I try, on a back page of my notebook, to categorize the people who are drawn to Jolotundo, but the groupings splinter and multiply beyond the point of usefulness: there are Kejawen traditionalists, esoteric modern mystics, Majapahit fetishists, the casually curious, Santris, Balinese, Christians, Chinese – and now at least one foreigner…

***

It is midnight.  I make my way up from the warung to the temple.  The forest is a wall of insect noise and between the treetops the narrow strip of sky is smeared with stars.  The noise of running water fills the air.

   Four men are sitting at the edge of the pool.  They are three Javanese and a Balinese man named Widiyasa who have driven up together from Surabaya.  They have just finished their ceremony.

   Why, I ask, have they felt compelled to come here in the middle of the night?

   “This is a good place to make myself pure, to clean myself,” says Widiyasa.  “There is still something here from Majapahit time.”

   “The power, you mean?” I ask.  I can see nothing of Widiyasa’s face in the darkness and would never recognize him if we passed one another in a Surabaya shopping mall.

   “There is more than that,” he says; “actually Majapahit itself is still there, still complete; you just cannot see it unless you have sixth sense.  At night the condition is better.  Between midnight and 2 am we say the gate is open; that is the time when there is something really special here...”

   When Widiyasa and his friends have gone, lighting the way back to the road with their mobile phones, I am alone in the darkness.  It is 1 am.  The gate is open.

   I tiptoe over the stepping stones and up the slippery ladder to the edge of the bathing tank.  The masonry is cold and wet and here the noise of running water is a roar.  I undress, shivering in the starlight, and drop into the cool, clear water...

©Tim Hannigan 2010

History on Sabu Island

Captain Cook and the remote island of Sabu, Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 01/06/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/travel/history-and-lethargy-on-sabu-island/378141

The island lies to starboard in the grey light of the dawn – a streak of pale sand and a dense wall of lontar palms. I watch from the upper deck of the ferry as a concrete jetty materializes from the shoreline, marking the location of Seba, capital of the tiny island of Sabu, one of the most isolated of all Indonesia’s scattered landfalls.
Two hundred and forty years ago another vessel approached this same shore. It was not a rusting ASDP ferry, but an English sailing ship under the command of the celebrated Captain Cook, returning from his first successful exploration of the Pacific. Cook had stumbled upon Sabu, a dot in the ocean halfway between Timor and Sumba, by chance, for at that time he noted, it was “so little known that I never saw a map or chart in which it is clearly or accurately laid down”. Still, he was glad to have found it, for he was short of supplies. The island was, he wrote, “a most pleasing prospect from the sea”. After 15 hours on a ferry, it still is.

The arrival of the ferry from Kupang marks the busiest day of the week in Seba. But by the time I have settled down in one of the little township’s simple home-stays a damp, tropical torpor has returned. Electricity is only available here during the hours of darkness, and even motorbikes are few and far between. Children play amongst the puddles as a thin rain begins to fall.
There is, however, a certain buzz around Seba these days. For years Sabu, with a population of around 60,000, was an appendage of the Kupang Regency, administered from the East Nusa Tenggara capital, 250 kilometers to the east. But last year it became a regency in its own right.
Sitting drinking coffee outside his house on Seba’s muddy main street as the rain continues to fall, local Arman al Gadri tells me that the upgrade to regency status has been welcomed in Sabu, raising hopes of increased development. The biggest problem that the island faces, he says, is transport. One or two ferries a week connect the island to Kupang, but it’s an exposed crossing, and in the wet season the island can be cut off for weeks. Air links are even more tenuous: the tiny Merpati plane that serves Sabu sometimes only makes it to the island a couple of times a month.

There were no ferries at all when Captain Cook arrived in 1770, but treaties had already been signed between the Dutch and the rulers of Sabu’s five principalities, and Seba was home to an official resident, Johan Lange. Marooned at his lonely outpost Lange was the archetypal corrupt colonialist, and he issued threats until Cook and his men paid the locals in cash for their supplies – cash that Cook was convinced was destined for Lange’s own coffers.
The Dutch had become involved with Sabu in the previous century. In 1674 nervous islanders had massacred the shipwrecked crew of a Dutch vessel, and in seeking revenge Dutch forces formed an alliance with the king of Seba and set out on punitive raids of the neighboring principalities.

The next day I visit the spot where Sabunese defensive architecture defeated those early Dutch attackers. Some twenty kilometers east of Seba, the hilltop village of Hurati is abandoned now, a place of crooked trees and crumbling foundations. But the sturdy surrounding wall that the Dutch failed to penetrate still stands. They were forced to accept a nominal payment instead of total conquest as recompense.
Though the arrival of the Dutch is usually seen as the first European contact with Sabu, Captain Cook noted in 1770 that “many of the people can speake Portuguese, but hardly any one Dutch”, and as the Portuguese had been present on neighboring Flores long before the Dutch arrived on the scene, it seems likely that it was they who made the first landfall here.

The following day I head for the hills on a borrowed motorbike. Cook declared that most of the Sabunese were “heathens and others of no religion at all”. Today, with the exception of a handful of Muslim Sabunese-Arab families in Seba, the majority are nominal Protestants, but old traditions are strong.
In the hilltop kampung of Namata, south of Seba, the original ancestor-worshipping Jingi Tiu religion still lingers. When I arrive most of the villagers are out at work in the surrounding fields, but a woman named Hi’a tells me that during Jingi Tiu ceremonies people from around the island, dressed in traditional ikat cloth, descend on Namata.
The houses have long thatched roofs. According to legend the first settlers came originally from India – and the Sabunese do indeed often look decidedly Indian. When they came ashore they turned their boats upside down for shelter, and traditional Sabu houses still symbolize these makeshift dwellings. On the outskirts of the village a picture of a European sailing ship is carved into a slab of grainy yellow sandstone, another echo of those early European contacts.
From Namata I follow a rough road south into rolling hills grazed by sheep and horses. Sabu is a dry island – “indifferently water'd in the dry season” according to Cook – where maize is the staple crop and drought is a real risk.
On the stony southern coastline I reach the village of Ege. There is a foreign connection here too, for locals say that Ege means “English” in the Sabunese language. At some uncertain time in the past, they say, a British ship ran aground near here, and the sailors received a rather warmer welcome than the unfortunate Dutch of 1674. They were housed by the locals while they repaired their ship and remembered fondly when they went on their way.
There are echoes of a more recent and less happy historical episode at Ege too. The old village – surrounded like Hurati by a formidable wall of black basalt – is abandoned now. Two local men, Daud and Lido, take me there. The place was used as a fort by the Japanese occupiers during World War II.
“We know from our grandparents that the Japanese time was the hardest time of all,” says Lido, pointing out the loopholes for rifles that the soldiers knocked through the walls; “people had to work for them from six in the morning until six in the evening without food, and if people did something wrong they would tie them up and leave them in the sun. But then the British came back and chased them away!”

Over the next two days I travel the back roads of Sabu, finding warm welcomes and fine white beaches where seawater is left in upturned clamshells to evaporate and make salt. Bumpy tracks lead to hilltops offering swelling views to rocky shores, to the off-lying hulk of Raijua Island, and to the empty horizon beyond.
Captain Cook noted that the people of Sabu were addicted to betel nut – and they still are; smiles here have an extra dash of red color. The other lifeblood of Sabu is the lontar palm, which provides sweet sap for making sugar and palm wine, described by Captain Cook as “a very sweet agreeable Cooling liquor”. On other islands people hack steps into the trunks to get at the harvest, but in Sabu there is such respect for this “tree of life” that locals wish to do it no injury and bind smooth pebbles to the trunk with twists of dried leaf for footholds instead.

Captain Cook sailed from Sabu on 21 September 1770, bearing west past the tiny, uninhabited islet of Dana, said to be home of ancestral souls in the Jingi Tiu tradition, and heading for Java. As the island fell behind, Cook called his men together and swore them to secrecy about the place they had just visited for fear of arousing Dutch jealously in Batavia. As I make my own departure on the returning Kupang-bound ferry, watching the white beaches and lontar-clad hills fade to a dot on the empty horizon, it seems like the secret is still well kept.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Healing Waters

The Jolotundo Bathing Temple, near Trawas, East Java

Originally published in Asian Geographic Magazine, May 2010

http://www.asiangeo.com/latest_issue.html

The clearing, deep in the forest on the steep western slopes of the Penanggungan volcano, is full of gentle sound – insect noise, bird calls, and the ceaseless rush of running water. A scent of incense cuts across the earthy smells of the jungle.
The temple, a façade of mildewed basalt fronted by a shallow pool, is set into the steep green hillside. Clear, cool water, straight from the heart of the mountain, pours from spouts in the masonry, just as it has done for more than a thousand years.
This place, Candi Jolotundo, two hours south of Surabaya, the seething capital of East Java, was built in 977 AD under the great Hindu Sanjaya kingdom, the same dynasty that built the more famous Prambanan temple in Central Java. Today, long since Sanjaya faded from the scene, and long since the Hinduism of old Java gave way to Islam, the temple is still known by local people as a place of power, pilgrimage and healing.

Jolotundo was always a bathing temple, and the modern pilgrims who make their way up the steep, potholed track through the forest from the hot, dusty cities of Sidoarjo, Surabaya and Mojokerto say that its water has healing properties.
Drawn from underground springs, the water is cool, clear and sweet. Some of the most regular visitors to Jolotundo are people with health problems.
A man named Ajianto, from nearby Sidoarjo, says he has come here almost every day since suffering a stroke several years ago. The stroke affected his speech and his balance, but, he says, regular dips in the chilly, stone-lined bathing tank at the temple help greatly to relieve his symptoms. Other visitors echo his story with tales of back aches and asthma cured after bathing here.
The water – both in its drinking quality and its healing power – ranks with the best in the world. One local man, Syafik, says it is bettered only by the water of the Zamzam well in Mecca, and the source of the Ganges in the high Himalayas.

This easy referencing of both Islam and Hinduism is central to Jolotundo’s enduring attraction for Javanese people in the 21st Century: this is a key place for people who follow the tangle of Hindu concepts, Islamic formulas, ancestor veneration and spirit appeasement known as Kejawen, the traditional Javanese religion and the counterpoint to modern Islamic orthodoxy.
Many of Jolotundo’s visitors are followers of Kejawen. For traditionalist Javanese people the concept of sacred energy, kesakten, contained in people, places and objects is important, and Jolotundo is a place of great power.
Pilgrims bring offerings of petals, known as sesajen, in little trays of woven paper or leaves. They light slim red incense sticks, and settle themselves to meditate on the temple’s central platform. Meditation, known as semedi, is the way to access the power of places like Jolotundo, and the best time to do it is at night.
Remote and isolated though the temple is – it lies several kilometers beyond the nearest village – there are people here every night. The time when the healing power of the water is said to be at its strongest is between midnight and 2 am. The power is particularly intense, pilgrims say, in the early hours of Friday morning, and still more so on the night of a full moon or a Kliwon Tuesday, when the second day of the seven-day week meets with the last day of the five-day Javanese calendar.
“On those nights it’s really busy. You have to queue to bathe, for two hours sometimes,” says a local stallholder named Sembodo.
One midnight visitor claims that in the darkness Jolotundo becomes a gateway to another world, while another whispers more tails of healing: a woman from Sidoarjo had been trying for a baby for years, he says, but only had her wished-for son after bathing here at midnight on a Kliwon Tuesday.
In the intense, cocooning darkness, filled with the sound of running water and marked only by the orange pinpricks of incense sticks and the meandering green sparks of the fireflies, even a skeptic might believe such stories…

© Tim Hannigan 2010