The people of Tenganan are tall, slender, and aristocratic
in a rather ghostly, decadent way, with light skins and refined
manners. The majority of the men still wear their hair long.
They are proud and look down even on the Hindu-Balinese nobility,
who respect them and leave them alone. They live in a strange
communistic or, rather, patriarchal-communalistic system in
which individual ownership of property is not recognized and
in which even the plans and measurements of the houses are set
and alike for everybody. The village of Tenganan owns communally
enormous tracts of fertile and well-cultivated lands that fill
every need of the village and make it one of the richest in
the island. I-Tanggu' told me this legend of how the land came
to belong to the village:
" Hundreds of years ago, long before the Hindu-Javanese
set. tled in, Bali, the powerful king Bedaulu lost his favorites
horse. Broken-hearted, the king sent the men of whole villages
in all directions with orders to find the stray horse.
The Tenganans went eastward until, after days of travel, they
found the corpse of the horse. The king asked them to name their
reward, but their spokesman said they wanted only the land where
the horse was found; that is, the area covered by the smell
of the carcass. Although the horse bad been dead for many days
under the tropical sun, Bedaulu considered this a modest request
and sent an official with a delicate sense of smell to measure
off the land, starting from the place where the horse lay. Accompanied
by the chief of Tenganan, he walked for days, but no matter
how far the two went, the smell seemed to follow them. Finally
the official was exhausted and could go no farther; he said
be considered the land already covered enough, and e Tenganans
were satisfied. When the official left, the chief pulled from
under his clothes a large piece of the rotten flesh of the horse."
I was' told me the story by my parents as we went up to the
top of a bill to look at one of the remains of the famous horse;
the penis, " which had turned to stone." On the summit,
under a large tree, was the relic, a long river stone shaped
like a phallus by the action of water. Passing people had left
offerings on top of it. My parents' also said that the people
of Tenganan are not permitted to work their vast lands with
their own bands, but hire other Balinese to do the agricultural
work for them. The aristocratic communists of Tenganan go to
the plantation only to make tuak, beer from sugar palms.
On the way down the hill, a glimpse of the sacred temple of
Tenganancan be seen, of which we had heard mysterious reports.
It was a small enclosure under a great banyan tree surrounded
by a low wall of uncut stones roughly piled up. Inside were
a few mounds of the same stones, reminiscent of altars, and
in one of them there was a larger stone with what appeared to
be a natural cavity. I could not go into the enclosure because
no outsider (except to Tenganan people) is ever permitted to
enter it. We could not divulge the purpose of such a primitive
" temple " and could not even name the deities worshipped
there, but be added mysteriously that there were three of them
It seems extraordinary that this pile of stones is the only
sacred, " essential " place of worship for the Tenganans,
who are expert carvers and fine artists.'
just outside the village we could see a regular Balinese-style
temple with fine roofs and elaborate carvings, but this, did
not mean much to them and was more for the use of their Balinese
guests and coolies, perhaps as a concession to the official
cult of the island, so that they would not be considered as
savages, people without a " proper " temple.
