Mantras Between Fire and Water: Reflections on a Balinese Rite.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Review

By FRITS STAAL, with an appendix by DICK VAN DER MEIJ. Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Verhandelingen, Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 166. Amsterdam: NORTH-HOLLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY, 1995. Pp. viii + 112.

With Reflections on a Balinese Ritual, "no more than a pilot project" (p. viii), Staal engages in a discourse with numerous predecessors "more competent in these areas than I shall ever be." Yet, he feels that "their work is not finished," and proposes to "briefly indicate in which direction . . . solutions may be found" (p. vii).

Right from the outset Staal reacts against the still commonly held generalization that "Bali remains the showcase of 'Hinduism' in Indonesia and thus of 'Hinduization'" (p. 1; emphasis added). To the concept of Hinduization, most prominently demonstrated in Georges Coedes' Histoire ancienne des etats hindouises d'Extreme-Orient (1944), Staal juxtaposes Hermann Kulke's concept of "convergence," "which is apt in many contexts" (p. 1), which even "remains a possibility in the majority of cases" (p. 21), but not in all (p. 11). In addition, there are situations in which "we may have neither Indianization nor convergence but parallel development" (p. 21).

Indianization - "to the extent there was any" (p. 10), "if there is 'Indianization' anywhere" (p. 11) - must be looked for in the domain of the padanda, in particular in the padanda Siva's daily ritual known as sarya-sevana. "I conclude that there is at least some such Indianization, and that it pertains to mantras" (p. 11; cf. p. 47: "the chief instruments of Indianization were mantras").

In Bali, as in India, mantras are the sounds of ritual; even as the gestures (mudra) that are associated with the sounds, they should not be treated as "texts." To study mantras, a textual, philological approach has but "limited applicability" (p. 6). This stand, which has been Staal's in earlier publications, naturally leads him to a courteous but basic disagreement with one of the principal philological writers on Balinese mantras and mudras, Christiaan Hooykaas, to whose memory the volume is dedicated. Hooykaas, who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was aware of the limitations which post-War developments in Southeast Asia had imposed on his work: "My approach is mainly that of the philologist who tries to understand his textual materials and to explain them. Not being able to spend my life in my field of predilection, as before...