I have a friend named Anthony who studied calligraphy in China. On the last day of class, before handing out certificates, the calligraphy master gave a very earnest and insult-ridden speech during which he said none of the people in the room should ever say he was their teacher. He said to do so would be like eating a delicious meal at a five-star restaurant, pointing the following day to one’s shit, and speaking the chef’s name.
I mention this at the outset to say why I’m going to be a little cagey about this trip to Bali I made and why I went. I mean, I’m a Buddhist, but I don’t want to say who my teacher is, because I’m not an exemplary student. Anyway, this past summer he was giving a course in California, and on the third or fourth day during lunch, people were asking him informal questions about their lives. We were gathered on the grass—about 40 of us, out of maybe 400 attendees—and he was sitting at a picnic bench. One young man said he was going to Asia and wanted advice about which countries to visit.
“Morocco, Shanghai… then India.”
A Chinese woman about my age—I am 35—asked how she should pick a partner, and rather than answering, he turned the question over to one of his longtime students, who said, “You shouldn’t choose. It’s when you choose, see, that you’re scaring them away. You should just wait to see what comes along.”
It sounded like hippie nonsense to me, and so when my teacher looked up I rolled my eyes. He held my gaze for a second, and I knew he meant that it was good advice, that what the other man had said was true. Then he said, in a quiet voice, “You should go to Bali and make offerings to…” I missed the name. He was speaking to the Chinese woman, not me. I wanted to raise my hand right then and say, “Who?” but I was shy about it.
A couple months later, I got in touch with my teacher’s secretary and told her I was going to Bali to make offerings to a goddess based on this thing I’d overheard—and that VICE had commissioned me to write this piece and I was leaving in three days—but I wasn’t sure who the god was. She said she’d ask. I was in Korea, switching planes, when I got an email from her. The answer was one word: “Shiva.”
I think maybe that anecdote tells you how little you can trust me to explain anything. I just couldn’t explain a complicated religion. But I will try to give my understanding of Buddhism.
The idea, as I get it, is to wake up—to end the constant delusion. By “delusion,” I mean looking at something that is not real and thinking it is real. And this, according to Buddhism, is everything. Not just rainbows or dreams—but everything. This is not to say that one day, if you were to wake up, and you were no longer deluded, that everything as you know it would disappear, and you would grow a halo, but rather that, to take a small example, the way you look at shapes would be forever changed.
In order to take steps toward waking up, teachers use any means at hand. One method of cracking a lazy, so-called skeptical mind is through “belief.” This is my interpretation, but to shatter this self-satisfied, arrogant mind-set that accepts everything it has been told and mistakes this acceptance for skepticism, a teacher might introduce a strange and superstitious belief. And a student would work with that, crack open the skeptical mind, at which point the teacher might say, “Come on, you don’t really believe that!” and this could go on and on, peeling away layers of hardened mind-sets, until nothing is left.
So that’s sort of the principle, I think, that led me to be on a plane landing in Bali at 1 AM.
I had a ride prearranged. The drive to the area of the first temple was about three hours. It was called Pura Ulu Danu Bratan. I had chosen it looking for a temple to the Hindu goddess Parvati, but as it happens, it is a major Shivaite temple. It has a larger temple to the lake and river goddess, Dewi Danu, and a smaller one to Shiva and Parvati. This smaller temple is only accessible by boat. It holds statues of Shiva, Parvati, and the Buddha.
I had seen pictures of the area online, and I thought I would be able to buy flowers to offer there. Also, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep, so I just wasn’t thinking clearly. Once I got in, I saw that there wasn’t any place to buy flowers, and that the smaller Shiva temple—ordinarily accessible by boat—was, during low tide, inaccessible.
I stood on the bank opposite the shrine, wondering what I could do. The temple was only about 30 feet from where I stood.
A woman my age, two heads shorter, approached me. She was holding a camera out toward me, and so I made a move to accept it, assuming she was asking me to take her picture. She shook her head—of course—and I posed for several pictures with her aunts. I even smiled in them.
When they were done, the girl thanked me, and I said, “Actually, let me ask you something. Can people go to that temple?”
She said yes. I asked her how, and she made a vague gesture with her hand.
I said, “Come walk with me and show me,” and she made the gesture a second time, pointing down at the riverbank. Then she said, “You’re welcome,” and walked away.
Down near where she was pointing, standing in the mud in the shadow of the temple, several little boys had their shoes off, and they were fishing. I went down to the bank opposite where they stood, and looked at the mud where they had walked. It was the bed of the pond, exposed in the low tide, and thinking that I would get my feet muddy walking through it, I sighed and took a reluctant first step; I sank all the way to my knees.
By chance, on the plane ride over, I’d been reading an essay about a writer who went and spent time with some worm gatherers in Maine. The essay included several harrowing scenes, where the writer sank in the mud and envisioned dying—he was hip deep, I think, and the mud was sucking at his heels, but still, this was fresh in my mind, so rather than pausing and feeling disgust, I just kept walking, knee-deep each step, to the other side of the creek bed and the staircase that ordinarily rose out of the water during high tide, which I took up to the temple itself.
I had a couple offerings I brought from home: a silk bag of semiprecious stones and an iPod with a couple albums from St. Vincent, whom I admire because she seems to me an ideal woman in that she is capable of being vulnerable. I was raised to believe that a woman shouldn’t take any crap from men. Somehow I think this was in the air the whole time I was growing up, and at the risk of making people angry, I think this is wrong. I think in fact a woman’s strength is her vulnerability, and that all this tough talk I got—in op-ed columns and films about tough ladies in relationships with men—just confused me. With St. Vincent and vulnerability, I am thinking in particular of a live version of the song “Marry Me” that I often watch on repeat on YouTube. I think she’s got it right.
I didn’t really have anything else, but I’d sort of been thinking about it on the way—about what I could offer—and I thought maybe I could offer this story, of the first time I let myself really fall in love. So I did that. I sat there and I told this story about falling in love with the wrong person, and having my heart broken, or at least, I thought it through, and then I thought to myself, “But why don’t you tell it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a beautiful story.”
I went and found my driver, and we went back to the hotel.
The next day, my driver and I had made arrangements to visit several smaller temples, and then go up to the main temple of Bali, at Besakih. But in the morning, while I was waiting for him to arrive, I got into a conversation with the owner of my hotel. I told him I was in Bali to make offerings to Shiva, and he told me that if that was the case, I really needed to go up to a small temple at the top of the mountain across the ridge. He pointed it out to me, across the range, the second-highest mountain in Bali—just some black peak in the distance. His English wasn’t so good, so I might have misunderstood, but it seemed like he said the mountain was a ling, and the lake below it was a yoni. I don’t know too much about that stuff, except that ling means “penis,” and yoni means “vagina.” Anyway, it sounded, from what he said, like the place to be, so I said, “OK. I’ll go.”
I could tell this took him by surprise. He helped me to find a local guide, and he said to me a few times, “The temple is very simple.” He encouraged me to take a packed lunch from the hotel kitchen—his compliments—and said something about a cave, and how it went to the bottom of the world, and how that represented the Hindu view of the cycle of life. I think he also said this cave, in the Hindu cosmology, represented the center of the world, but I couldn’t really understand him, and mostly, I did a lot of confused nodding.
I had told my driver several times that it was crucial that we stop and buy flowers. Still, when I saw a couple small stands on the side of the road, I didn’t say anything. I assumed he had a plan.
We reached the end of the paved road, and it was time for me to leave my driver and get onto the motorcycle of my young guide, and my driver turned to me and said, “Did you buy flowers?”
I should have said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I told you I needed to,” but instead, I just sort of said, “Nooooo…”
“Well… you can get some up there. He has some.”
I should have done something, after coming all this way just to make offerings, but I was stupefied. The hotel owner had told me the hike would take an hour and a half, but on the way over, my driver explained it would in fact take seven. I was in Bali. I was disoriented. And so I just got onto the motorcycle and we drove up the mountain.
My guide was maybe 20 years old. He wore a red-checked hooded sweatshirt and tucked his laces into his shoes. When we got to the end of the dirt road, he parked his motorcycle beside a shack and went and had a brief discussion with the owner. Then we set out on foot.
After about two miles, we came to a small mountain trail. The trail was to the left of where we stood, and it went up the mountain. To the right was a field, where a young boy dressed in sackcloth was harvesting blue flowers with a scythe. My guide said something to me and pointed at the boy. I nodded gratefully, assuming we would buy flowers,. He spoke to the boy, who went and got another boy, who then led us up the path. I know, again, I should have said, “Hey, I want to buy some flowers.” Of course, none of them spoke English, but I could have communicated that much with my hands. Instead, I followed the two boys up the path. After about maybe a mile, the young boy pointed. He and the guide spoke, I gave the boy a little money, and he went back down the hill.
I can’t say much happened when we got to the top. The temple itself, once you got about a quarter mile from it, is buffered by smaller temples, nearly unnoticeable things, really, and we stopped at each of these. My guide had brought some small, Balinese-style flower offerings, and since I didn’t have anything else, I offered my lunch in pieces—first a banana, then an orange, then the fruit cup, then the rice pancakes, and finally the cheese sandwich. At each stop I prayed the same thing: Let me find a man. Let me be showered with male attention. I want a baby. Stuff like that.
The main temple featured a small lion statue that had lost its face and had a silk scarf wrapped around its waist. I think this lion was a protector, and beside it was Shiva himself—a painting covered by a piece of cloth. We prayed here and then went over the ridge, down a path so steep I had to descend it crab-walking on my hands and feet. We went down that way about 20 feet and then stopped at a tree wrapped in black-and-white-checked fabric. I could see a cave from there, and I could see that it was amazing, but my guide wouldn’t let me go past the fabric. He even felt I might bolt, and so he held me sternly by one hand and said, “It’s not good.” I don’t know if it was that you shouldn’t approach it, or if it was dangerous, but we just stood and watched, and then we went back up, and again, for a little while, we sat at the altar and prayed. Sitting there, I thought, “Do I even want a boyfriend?” At that moment, I couldn’t help thinking the answer was no. I’m a solitary and strange person, and I don’t know how to have someone close to me.
The next day, I went on the big pilgrimage, making offerings at two smaller temples and then going up to the main temple of Bali, the Mother Temple of Besakih. This time, I had the driver take me to the market, where I bought offerings. The driver tried to select a basket for me. He picked a modest one, the size of a dinner plate, but I told him I thought it should be bigger.
“No,” he said, “this is all you need.”
I was running out of chances to get this right. My eyes fell on the biggest basket in the store. I wasn’t even sure it was intended for making offerings (later I learned it was). I said, “Three of these.”
We spent about an hour buying fruit and flowers to fill the three baskets. It was enough to fill the entire trunk of the car, but still, I had a hard time making the baskets look bountiful. We made the offerings at the first two temples, and then on the road to the last, I asked the driver to stop at a mango stand, and I bought about 24 pounds.
When we got to the parking lot at Besakih, I went and filled up the last basket. I put in the mangoes, a watermelon, and a couple pineapples—then flowers, cakes, and smaller fruits. It was extremely heavy, and as we headed up to the temple, the driver and then a local guide told me I would need help carrying the basket up the stairs. They also told me I shouldn’t try carrying the basket in front of me but should balance it on my head.
I don’t really like making people carry my things. Also, I felt like my offerings were not as beautiful as I’d wanted them to be, so maybe a part of my offering could be carrying it myself. I think I carried the basket up five flights of stone stairs. It was overcast, threatening rain. We entered a stone pavilion, where a ceremony was going on. The local guide directed me to lean my basket against a stone theater in the back left of the space, but the local priest saw me and told the guide to let me sit beside him.
All the people in attendance—maybe 75 of them—had brought offerings, many in baskets like mine, but none so heavy. At some signal, they came forward—they were all women—and took the baskets to a stairwell leading to Shiva’s temple. Each touched her basket to the staircase and walked away, and when my turn came, I did the same. One of the temple hands, a woman dressed all in white, came and began to sort through my offering basket, but the driver stopped her. He said to me, “You don’t want to keep any of this, do you?” and I said no, so she gave me a small collection, a couple fruits, to eat later as a blessing. I was also given three sips of holy water and rice—it was touched to my forehead and chest—and I was given a few grains to eat. And I prayed, or I thought, “I want a husband. I want a baby. Let it rain men.” And then it was time to go.
You see, on my last night, I had arranged to stay in a guest cottage of a woman who lived between the Besakih Temple and the airport. Before my trip, when we were in touch by email, I’d told her a little about my project. It was before I’d heard back from my teacher, and so I’d said I was making offerings to the “goddess of love.” She replied and asked me to join her at a local ceremony, where I could meet a living goddess.
The ceremony was held in a small village about 45 minutes outside Ubud. It was held in a stone-walled enclosure, with two square patios divided by a narrow passage. One of the square patios had several outdoor seating platforms under Balinese pagoda-style roofs. One, to the left, had a tiled floor and was for honored guests—Brahmins of high rank. The other, to the right, was cement, and less protected from the elements. Locals sat there, as well as a bunch of women in matching pink skirts and sarongs. They were, I later learned, the band—it was a special thing, an all-woman group, to celebrate the guest of honor.
She, the g of h, was a 25-year-old woman born in the village. She had lived an ordinary life. At the age of 21, she had even left Bali for Singapore to seek work, but she hadn’t gotten a single interview. She came back to Bali and became depressed. Her father—a small-time local priest—took pity on her and started to teach her a little of what he knew.
In a very short amount of time, I was told, she began to slip into deep trances, where she would communicate with the divine. The divine explained to her that her worldly life had come to an end, and that going forward, it would be her job to act as its vessel. Her mission, in short, was to save the world.
This story was regarded with a great deal of skepticism, I was told. In Bali, a Hindu society, the Brahmin priests are cliquish, to say the least, and they didn’t really think this story held a lot of water. But they examined her, and her understanding was apparently unblemished, and she knew all the mudras, or hand gestures. I was also told—and this made me feel a little uncomfortable—that she spoke 11 languages, one of which had a name like Astra. Did I dream this? I think I dreamed it, that I was told this was the language of the stars.
So we were in this place, and it was around 6 PM. My host had, I think, gathered from my posture and expression that I was enduring her with goodwill, and this irritated her, so she started to lash out at me a little. She said that projects like mine, ever since the release of the book Eat, Pray, Love, were going on all the time. I said, “Well, I never read that book,” and I told her the story of the California Q&A.
She said, “It was like, as soon as that book came out, you’d see women walking around Ubud with it under their arm. They’d be like, ‘I just read the most amazing book,’ and we’d be like, ‘We know.’”
I said, “I never read it.”
She said, “Just because Elizabeth Gilbert met a man in Ubud, all the single women in the world come here thinking they’re going to find a man.”
Someone came around with small cups of tea, sweetened with syrup. A rooster strutted across the path. He wasn’t long for this world. A part of the ritual included sacrifice, something I preferred, being squeamish, not to really know about.
Up till this point, myself and another woman were the only guests who weren’t Balinese, but as the hour of the ceremony’s start approached, several other Westerners arrived. They wore all white. One had a tattoo on his forehead, the outline of a third eye. Mary explained to me that he ran a travel agency that visited places like Mongolia, Tibet, and Bhutan. I heard him talking with a friend of his as the girl from the village, who was receiving the highest Brahmin rank that evening—the rank of high priestess—had her waist entwined in velvet cloth. He said, “Are those crystals new? She’s looking especially sparkly tonight.”
Among the locals was a man with élan. He was cool looking. He was not, by any means at all, a handsome man, but he had himself in order. Unlike the other guests, who mostly wore white, he was in dark colors—a gray nearly black—and his sarong just sat on him correctly. He came and took a chair beside me when Mary stood, and introduced himself, and I said to him, “I like your glasses.”
“Oh, these,” he said, “I got these in France in 1991.”
He explained to me he’d bought them at a fashion show from John Galliano. He said when he bought them, he got three pairs, and he replaced the lenses—which had been green—with ones in a pilot’s shade of orange. He said later Galliano saw his lenses and said he’d made a good choice; that the orange was better than the green.
He talked a lot. He told me that he was a psychiatrist, trained in Alabama, and he talked about a paper of his on neuromechanics that had led to a consulting position with the Department of Defense. He took me in back to look at the offerings, which were piled floor to ceiling, filling an entire room, and then he took me back to our chairs. On the throne at the head of the pavilion, the ceremony had begun.The guy with the glasses, whose title was Gusti—given to him by the local Brahmin—turned to one of the Westerners behind us and said, “Can you feel the energy?” The Westerner said he could. Then Gusti turned to me, “How about you,” he said, “can you feel the energy?” I told him that I couldn’t.
He took my hand. “I’ll open it for you,” he said, and asked me to breathe deeply. I obliged. We took several breaths like that and he said, “How about now?” I was sorry to tell him I didn’t. Later I was told that he’s known as a great defender of the high priestess, and when I said that, I could see he was a little angry but didn’t want to upset me, so he simply said, “Well…” and stood and walked away.
The ceremony involved singing and chanting. The high priestess sat with her back to us. She had a beautiful back and a beautiful way—her movements were unusual. She was erect but not stiff. Her motions were fast, trained, like a dancer who is supremely confident, in her prime—all grace. When she tossed a flower, it would be flying from her hand before I noticed she had gestured. But still, I didn’t feel anything at all.
Gusti came back up after about an hour and sat beside me. He pointed out some of the Brahmin in the left-side seating area. He said, “You should get their picture. They’re equal in rank to her, but they are Vishnuites, so they’re very humble.”
I just kind of nodded, like, “Yeah, yeah,” so he said it again. He repeated it a few times, so I got out my camera, and together we walked up, to a position where I could shoot the photo. He was still repeating that thing about their being Vishnuites, and finally something dawned on me, and I turned to him. I said, “What god is she associated with?”
“Shiva.”
I said, “What’s her relationship to Shiva?” and he said, “She would have to explain that to you herself. It’s very complicated.”
Maybe my expression revealed something of what he liked, in conversations surrounding her, to see, because he said, “She is Shiva and the Buddha combined.”
At that, my skin broke out into gooseflesh, and—if not the next day—at least until the end of the night, I felt I was in the presence of something terrifying and divine, and I prayed, with ardor, for this girl to help me find a man.
After I got back from Bali, I started a three-week screenwriting seminar at the Film School in Seattle. One of my classmates got a crush on me, and twice he came to class wearing a shirt with Shiva painted on it in tacky colors. His email address was sydart@—–.com [sic]. I told him I wasn’t interested. He told me he was married. Another one of my classmates seemed gay, but then he told a half-hour-long story about rough sex with a girl when he was 13. He said they thought she was pregnant, and in a fit of teen hysteria, he tried to give her an abortion by punching the baby out. I had a 24-hour crush on him after that. I noticed his burning gaze. I said to him, “Lemme see how you smell,” and he leaned forward and opened his shirt. He smelled powerfully human. A couple days later, a young attractive bartender at a place near my house asked me to come in the next Friday and said he’d teach me dominoes. (It’s Sunday as I write this. I will be there Friday.)
I live with my mom and don’t really know anybody in Seattle, so a couple times I’ve made profiles on online dating sites. I always give up and delete them after a couple days, because online dating sites seem to be populated by the extras in crowd scenes at sports games and shopping malls. I never knew there were so many men who talk like the TV.
There was one guy from online who wasn’t like the others, who I was in touch with on my phone. He was open and good-looking, risk-taking and alive. We were in touch, texting and all that, but both afraid to meet in person. I started writing a short story about us, set in a Hong Kong computer café. The girl—me, I guess—was 16 and a little overweight, and he was 40, and sick, always sitting at the same station night and day. I showed him what I had. I was sure he’d think I was crazy, but he didn’t. He said he wanted to see what happened in the end. I told him the truth was that the characters had to meet; I couldn’t make it up. My mom was out of town, so I told him to come over. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and a little thick in his chest and gut, which I like in a man. He was beautiful, and he had a soft but deep voice. He told me about different stuff, such as his view on aliens. He made a rational argument for their existence, and for why they don’t visit Earth.
“Maybe they do,” I said. “Maybe they take the form of humans.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve thought of that.”
“Maybe I’m one.”
He said: “And this is all a hologram? If it is, I wish you’d tell me, but don’t show me your face if it’s scary.”
I had to be quiet and not be in touch with him for a few days after that, because I heard it’s not a good idea to let a guy know how much you like him.
The Emanations of Shiva
