THE GREAT WORD by
Don Berry
I wish now I had never met the Keepers of the Great Word. I wish now I had never heeded the siren song of the Moon of Pejeng. If I ever escape, the "I" that returns to my mundane life will not be the "I" who came, full of innocence and anticipation, to this place, this demonic island of Bali.Background: My name is John Menander Doe. The "John Doe" is my parents' unforgivably feeble joke on my identity. The "Menander" is a small thing, but mine own. I learned early in life that the name "John Doe" is not merely humorous, but deeply disturbing to most people. It robs people of their illusion of individuality; it is not enough information for comfort, for certainty, for the sense that yes, that person is a distinct individual as I am. I truly believe that the ambiguity of my own name causes others to doubt their own individuality; at least so they behave.
It was thus through my own name that I came to understand the power of naming. As a thing (or person) is named, only so is it known; without precise naming there is no existence.
All aboriginal peoples take this for granted and work with it in various magical ways. As for me, until I gave myself the name Menander, I seemed to exist in a kind of half world for others, partly anonymous, partly physical, but always somehow disquieting. When I added Menander, all those problems ceased instantaneously. John Menander Doe was enough naming; it gave me individuality, personality, existence and, above all, ceased making me a problem for others. And "Dr. John Menander Doe, Ph.D." is more than just an individual. He is a personage.
I am now forty-four years old, a full professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a scholar well respected in my own field. My writings are known, and if I have not published widely, I have published well.
My specialty is unique. Perhaps this reflects the life-long pursuit of unique individuality that is the consequence of my ambiguous name, though it is not conscious. However, most ethnomusicologists specialize in a kind of music, a genre, an area of the world, perhaps even a particular tribe. I chose to specialize in a particular kind of instrument, wherever in the world it exists, whatever the music it is used for.
My field of study is the tuned idiophone. "Idiophone" means "self-sounding"; instruments whose sound is created by the vibration of their own bodies. Crudely put, a flute is normally an aerophone; its sound created by the vibrating of a column of air. But strike a flute with a stick, and it has become an idiophone.
Marimbas, xylophones, metallophones, gongs, bells and fallen logs; all these are idiophones, and the range of musical tones is at least as great as any other class of instrument; probably more than most. Idiophones are unquestionably the oldest kind of human instrument, long pre-dating history. Even Neanderthals may well have danced to the joyous song of tuned stone idiophones. Carefully worked slabs of stone, deliberately and carefully tuned in sets, have been found in several continents. These lithophones have been almost impossible to date, but I favor Neanderthals because the idea of Neanderthal man dancing irritates my colleagues beyond measure.
For one who loves the idiophone, the center of the world is Indonesia. Nowhere has the idiophone been perfected as it has in Indonesia. The gamelan is the most subtle and sophisticated music of the idiophone world, whether the formal court gamelan of Java or the magnificent Balinese orchestras. It's often described in impossibly romantic terms -- like the sound of moonlight on water -- but the magic in the complex interlacing webs of rippling bell-like tones is undeniable.
It was this sound, this mystery, this beauty, that brought me to Bali. That -- and the Moon of Pejeng.
My first experience of this magic, mystery and beauty was a bloody first rate catastrophe.
Oh, admittedly, the only real destruction was of my own preconceptions -- but, like most people, I put a higher value on my preconceptions than on my body. I'd trade a broken leg for a broken preconception any day, and think myself the better off for it. At least a broken leg doesn't leave you feeling like a hopeless romantic idiot.
Anyway, my first experience of Denpasar, the capitol city of Bali, was almost more than my nervous system could handle. I had come halfway across the world in search of beauty, specifically the beauty of sound, and Denpasar presented me with the polar opposite. The gods of Bali apparently reprimand as readily as they reward.
The whole city was an incredible cacophony of ugly sound; the snarling whine of motorbikes, the raucous putt-putting of the little three wheeled bemos, the hoots and honks and klaxons of mufflerless vehicles of every invention, buses, cars, motorcycles, dogs barking, people screaming at each other. And all this brutal din passed through a tropical air that was at least half soot, smelling like partly combusted diesel oil mixed with gasoline and -- well, I think you have the picture. Denpasar is what passes for a modern city in Southeast Asia, which is to say as close to intolerable hell as mankind has yet achieved, short of outright war.
The worst was that I felt betrayed -- even though I understood at some level that it was not Denpasar or Bali that had betrayed me, but my own silly adolescent dreams of paradise found; dreams to which a forty-four year old full professor is probably not entitled in any case.
Months ago I had arranged by mail to meet with an old friend of mine who now lives in Bali, Jean-Pierre Guidon. J.P. is a painter, a recent addition to a long list of European artists who have found the paradise in Bali that I was being denied. We were to meet at the Bali Museum off Puputan Square in Denpasar.
Puputan Square is a dreary urban desert whose only claim to fame is as a slaughterhouse; the site of the devastating massacre of the last Raja of the Badung Regency and his court. By the time I finally reached the Bali Museum I was shell-shocked by the infernal din of Denpasar, the brutality of history, jet lag, disappointment, and probably on the verge of unseemly tears -- which my urbane and thoughtful friend J.P. spotted from half a block away.
He walked purposefully away from the wall where he'd been standing and took me firmly by the elbow.
"John, my friend," he said smiling. "It is good to see you again. You -- ah, you look a little dazed." There was the merest hint of a question in his voice.
I gestured vaguely around me, unable to communicate my traveler's malaise. "I wasn't ready for this, Jean-Pierre," I said, feeling sheepish as well as put upon.
"Eh, bien," Jean-Pierre said. "It is a scandal, no? But take heart, my friend. Denpasar is not Bali. No more. Ten years ago..." His gallic shrug finished off the thought. It was a phrase I was to hear often. "Ten years ago..." It is nevertheless daunting to realize that (once again?) one has missed paradise by a mere ten years.
Jean-Pierre steered me firmly toward the building where he had been waiting for me. "Let us spend a few moments in the museum," he said. "It will help you relax."
And it did. The museum itself was absolutely splendid, a complex blend of temple and palace with rich ornamentation inside and out. It was not so much a building as a beautiful series of grassed courtyards, each pavilion showing a different facet of traditional architecture.
However, it was more the failures of the museum that comforted me than its successes. The arts of Bali are such an integral part of the life of the people that the formality of a museum ill-suits the living flow. Oddly enough, the artificiality of a museum setting only served to emphasize the internal vitality of the art and history and architecture of the island. In spite of my culture shock I began to sense an atmosphere of minds and spirits completely different from my own, an alien kind of knowing as foreign to my world as the Andromeda galaxy.
The arts seemed almost embarrassed to be here, separated from their true nature as part of a living world. They say that Balinese has no word for "artist", since the Balinese assume that everyone is an artist of some kind. But here, again, the 20th century had arrived ahead of me.
J.P. talked very little in the museum, leaving me mostly to my own devices. Once he commented briefly on a collection of clay Buddhist seals: "These seals are from near Pejeng," he said. "That's where we'll be going."
"Is that where you live?" I asked.
"No, I live near Ubud, in a village called Campuan. But Pejeng is not far. Actually, nothing is very far from anything else here."
"And Pejeng?"
"Ah, Pejeng," J.P. said, lifting a long graceful finger. "I am going to show you a wonder of the world. It will erase all unpleasantness from your mind, and bring you truly to Bali."
"And the wonder....?"
"The Moon of Pejeng. Binoculars are needed, which I shall supply."
Bless all understanding friends in strange places. With his gentle insight Jean-Pierre had almost restored the sense of magic and mystery the cacophony of Denpasar had stolen from me.
The Moon of Pejeng, The Moon of Pejeng. I rolled the sound about in my mind. There was magic in the name. Yes, things would turn around now.
Jean Pierre had rented a little Mitsubishi car for our journey, and in an amazingly short time we had left the gritty, dreary metropolis of Denpasar behind, and were headed north. It was not really "north", however, as J.P. explained. The Balinese, like so many islanders, have only two main directions; kaja -- toward the sea, and kelod -- toward the mountains. We were traveling kelod; toward the interior.
In only a few minutes drive we had left the city. The road, a main tourist route, was still lined with shops, stands, and small villages so built-up that they now almost run into each other; but the city agony thins quickly. Beyond the roadside buildings you begin to catch quick glimpses of terraced rice fields. By the time we entered Gianyar Regency less than half an hour later, the hills that began to rise ahead of us were completely sculptured by the rice paddies maintained over centuries.
"The place we're going is the most sacred in Bali," Jean Pierre said. "The area around Pejeng was the ancient capitol, hundreds of years before Hinduism. There are two sacred rivers that run only ten or fifteen kilometers apart, and the land between them is all sacred. It's also the center of the arts, and now -- tourism."
J.P. must have sensed my inner shudder, because he laughed. "The Balinese are an amazing people," he said. "So far they haven't lost their own integrity to the tourists, except perhaps in Kuta and Denpasar. What it will be like in twenty years no one can say, but -- so far, so good.
"Which brings me to the Moon of Pejeng. It is all of the above: sacred, art, and tourism. It's my welcome gift to you, John, a marvel in your own field."
"My own field?"
"You are the great expert in idiophones, are you not? The Moon of Pejeng is a sacred gong, so old no one knows when or where it came from. It is cast in a single piece, shaped like an hourglass and nearly ten feet long. That is Pejeng ahead," he added, "but we turn right here."
A moment later we arrived at the outer wall of a temple compound. The temples of Bali, the pura, are not single buildings, but rather enclosed and sometimes partitioned courtyards, with numerous buildings within a single wall.
The outer gate of this pura was definitely Hindu in decoration; several massive stone sculptures of wild pigs and a couple of the snake-god nagas flanked the outer gate.
"This temple is called Pura Panataran Sasih," Jean Pierre told me as we came to the gate. "It may be the oldest in Bali. I know a priest here."
He stopped the car and took two long pieces of light fabric from the glove compartment. He handed one of them to me, saying "Here, tie this around your waist like a sash. It's customary. We call it selendang."
"This is a beautiful language, Jean Pierre. But all the words sound alike to me -- I can't remember them for five seconds.
Jean Pierre laughed. "Language here is strange, my friend. First of all there's Indonesian. Then there's Balinese. And Balinese has four separate dialects, depending on which caste you are, and which caste you are speaking to."
"How do you keep it straight?"
"I don't. I always use the vocabulary they would use in speaking to someone of higher caste. They think me a fool, I suppose, but a courteous fool. The Balinese value courtesy rather highly."
Entering the Pura through the split gate was a decisive entry into another world. In the first courtyard were perhaps six separate small buildings, some of one story, some with several, like pagodas, but all with thatched roofs. Directly ahead of us was another gate, a stone temple with a burly sculpture at either side of the opening; clearly guards.
"The inner courtyard is the most sacred," J.P. said. "It's at the kaja end of the temple, and that's where the Moon of Pejeng hangs."
As we crossed the open court in front of one of the thatched buildings I had a strange sensation -- a feeling that is difficult to describe.
It was like swimming in a river, and suddenly encountering a cool current. But it was not temperature, it was a kind of -- resonance, a vibration, a humming that was so deep it was not even sound. As though we had passed through the field of an enormous magnetic generator. I looked around, but saw nothing. It came and went so quickly I could not even be certain it had happened.
"Did you feel that?" I asked, stopping.
Jean Pierre looked closely at me. "No," he said. "What was it?"
"I don't know," I said. "It was like a deep -- thrumming sensation. I don't know what it was. I've never felt anything like it."
"Mm," Jean Pierre said softly. "Well, you are doubtless more sensitive to sound than I. Myself, I am a visual person."
We continued on to the central gate and passed through into the inner courtyard. Here were several more of the low, thatched buildings, but also two towers much taller than the rest, in the corners of the far wall. They were perhaps three or four stories high -- I cannot remember exactly, because I was beginning to be distinctly uneasy. I was feeling a kind of sensation over my whole body, a sensation so subtle I could not exactly pin it down; but a sensation, nevertheless.
The Moon of Pejeng was mounted on a platform high on the left of the back towers. It was disappointing at first, because it really was so far away it needed J.P.'s binoculars to make out any detail -- but once in focus, it was compelling.
It was cast in the form of four faces, almost heart shaped, of which I could see only the two that were facing the courtyard. The eyes were perfectly round, and rather bulging -- clearly the striking surfaces for the gong. The unearthly quality of the faces was accentuated by elongated earlobes hung with disc shaped earrings like some Polynesian figures.
Altogether the faces suggested alien creatures from another planet -- there was a striking resemblance to some of the reports of UFO creatures in sensationalist journals.
"Was it made here?" I asked.
"No one knows for certain," Jean Pierre said. "And no one really agrees on the date. Most think it came from some time around 300 B.C., but others say the casting is too large. It must certainly be the largest gong ever cast in a single piece."
"Why do they call it the Moon?"
Jean Pierre laughed. "You will like this," he said. "In olden times the gods made seven moons to light the earth. One night, one of them fell out Of the sky and landed in a tree. This, unfortunately, lit up a thief in the middle of making his living. The thief fell into a panic at the brilliance of the light. He scampered up the tree and urinated on the moon to put it out. The moon exploded, the thief was killed, and the Moon of Pejeng was what was left. An excellent story, no?"
"An excellent story, yes."
I was feeling a little lightheaded when I took the binoculars away from my eyes. The story of the Moon of Pejeng delighted me, and seemed somehow perfectly normal, as odd things happening in dreams seem normal.
I looked around at the inner courtyard of the Pura, with its numerous small, thatch roofed shrines, towers and buildings. I could see nothing outside the walls but the tops of trees. Every detail of the temple buildings seemed to have an unnatural clarity -- somewhat resembling the visual amplification of a psychedelic mushroom trip, and yet not like that at all.
Suddenly that impression -- shifted -- and rather than an amplified sense of depth, everything I looked at seemed utterly two-dimensional, as though I were standing with my nose against a painting; able to make out colors and shapes, but unable to assign meaning or name to any of it.
I felt a strange clarity that was simultaneously stable and ephemeral. While every object I could see glowed with precise detail, I would not have been surprised to have everything vanish.
There was no fear attached to this sense of -- formlessness. It was too dreamlike for that; in my dream I did not expect things to conform to my normal notions, and would not be upset if they did not. But the thought crossed my mind that I had somehow ingested a psychedelic drug, and I wondered where. I could not remember when I had last eaten, nor what the meal had been.
I realized that my memory of things was coming and going in waves. I could not quite remember where I came from, or exactly what I was doing here. In the next moment -- everything snapped precisely back in place.
I could hear the faint murmur of voices, apparently speaking the mellifluous Balinese, for I couldn't understand a word. Every message I received from every sense -- sight, hearing, touch, smell -- was completely foreign to me. Everything I was seeing was completely new, everything I was hearing I had never heard before. I knew I had come here from somewhere else, but could not recall where or when that was. Nor did it seem to matter.
"Are you all right?" Jean-Pierre's voice seemed to come from a distance, and I did not at first understand the words.
"Yes. Yes, I'm fine," I said. "I'm feeling a little barangkali, is all. Saya barangkali." The Balinese words sounded strange coming out of my mouth, and I could scarcely keep from laughing.
"You feel -- 'perhaps'?" Jean Pierre said.
"Exactly," I heard myself say. "I feel a little 'perhaps' and a little 'perhaps not.'"
Jean Pierre took me gently by the arm and turned me. "I think now we should go," he said. "This was not intended, my friend. It was an accident."
We walked back toward the kelod end of the temple, and the outer courtyard. As we mounted the steps of the central gate leading away from the inner courtyard, a line of men emerged from a closed thatched house that had what looked like a stage in front of it.
There were a half dozen men, monks, though they wore the saffron robes of Buddhists rather than the Hindu I would have expected in this temple. They walked in a single line, their hands clasped high on their chests and their elbows held out rather formally. All had shaven heads, and their faces reflected an unimaginable serenity.
Just as I thought this, they all turned simultaneously toward me and smiled. It was a smile that carried a song of clear, friendly, welcome, as though they had heard my unvoiced thought with perfect clarity.
"I know this priest," Jean Pierre said. "His name is Wayan. Wait here a moment."
"Pedanda," he called softly. "Tolong bantu saya."
I understood he had asked for help from the head priest.
The man at the head of the column came over smiling. He was old -- ancient, rather, with that Asian antiquity that is unguessable. Jean Pierre said something to him in Balinese, and the priest looked me in the eye, still smiling in the most friendly fashion.
"What is happening to me?" I asked. I felt no alarm, but was aware that my grasp on things was slipping. I had tried to speak to my friend, and could not remember his name.
Jean Pierre spoke again, but the priest shook his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, and was the most perfectly still figure I have ever seen in a living being. When he opened his eyes again -- bright dark pearls caught in a web of wrinkles -- he spoke perfect, unaccented English.
"You have heard a thing you were not prepared to hear," he said. "This is a very rare thing. More often it takes years of preparation to hear the sound at all."
"What sound? Was it what I felt when we came in?"
"Yes. In this temple we Hear the Great Word once in each day, that the world may continue. We -- " and here he gestured to the other half dozen monks who were watching us without apparent concern, "We are the Keepers of the Great Word, the Perfect Word. Come. I will show you."
As we turned back toward the tiny thatched house from which they had all emerged, the other monks turned away in unison and left toward the main gate, leaving the priest and my friend and me alone.
I realized as we mounted the steps that this was the only one of the dozen or so buildings in Pura Penataran Sasih that was completely enclosed.
The interior was dark, a room perhaps ten by twenty feet. A row of meditation cushions, like those of a Zen temple, lined every wall. A low table, covered with a plain dark cloth, sat in the center of the chamber. As nearly as I could tell in the dusky interior, it was entirely without decoration.
The surface of the stone was rough, but the edges had clearly been worked to give it its rectangular form. On the upper surface there were dark reddish stains, the kind of red ocher I associated with images from Lascaux and the caves of Altamira. The marks were symbols, or letters, but long since faded almost from visibility and belonging to no alphabet I knew.
I recognized it instantly. It was a lithophone, a tuned stone of a kind I had seen only in museums, yet different from any I had ever seen, in ways I could not define.
"This is the Great Word," the priest said. "The Perfect Word before all other words, mother of words, Mother of the World. This is the Word that contains the World, and is not contained within the World."
I reached my finger toward the stone, but the priest gently fended my gesture away. "Not yet," he said. "You have heard only the echo of the Great Word, but your many-words world is crumbling from the mere echo."
"How do you sound the Great Word?" I asked.
"The Great Word is always sounding," the priest said. "It is the anahata nada, the Unstruck Sound. We are the Ones Who Hear. To hear the Great Word, your mind must be disciplined. The Ones Who Hear are the Masters of stillness. Only in perfect stillness can perfect sound bloom. The Great Word cannot be heard when the mind is full of the scurrying of small words."
I glanced at Jean Pierre. He understood my unspoken question, and only shook his head lightly. "No," he said. "My mind is never truly still. No matter how hard I try, I can't stop the small words and images always eddying around in my brain. I continue to hope, and I sometimes sit with the monks, but I have never heard even so much as you have heard by accident."
"Is this a secret society of some kind?"
The head priest chuckled. "There are no secrets. No secrets anywhere. All truth is always being presented to you, openly and clearly ... all that is necessary is to Hear. This world and all other worlds are of the nature of sound. That is all."
"The Great Word is -- like the Sanskrit AUM?"
He seemed to find this particularly amusing, and the wrinkles around his eyes closed so far I could almost not see his eyes at all. A tiny tear of laughter trickled from one corner, and he brushed it away with his sleeve.
"AUM is indeed a memory of the Great Word. Like the memory of a cow, it is very like a cow. But it is not a cow, after all. A cow in memory gives only memory milk. Still, it can remind you what a cow is like. And if AUM stills the mind -- why, then perhaps the Great Word can be heard.
"We do this Hearing that the world of ten thousand things may continue. We in the world of ten thousand things wish to distinguish between this and that, between frogs and clouds and motorbikes. When we create the small words for each thing, we fix that thing in existence. It is for the sake of experience, all this..." He swept his hand around in an all encompassing gesture. "Experience requires many distinctions between things, and each small word is a distinction, you see? The world of ten thousand things is maintained by all those distinctions made over and over again in the mind.
"But everything in the world of ten thousand things decays in time. Men die and women die and beetles die. The sea comes and goes, grass withers and rock crumbles. The greatest of mountains falls away in time. Everything is always coming into being and going out of being. Coming and going all the time, all the time. That is the price experiencers pay for the impermanence and joy of experience. Only the Great Word does not decay, and neither comes nor goes.
"So each day we come to Hear the Great Word, and by our Hearing the world of ten thousand things is created anew. If we were to cease, in time all things would cease. Each day the First Distinction must be made again, or all we treasure of life would wither and die."
"The First Distinction? What is the First Distinction?"
"Between This and That. This Hears and That is Heard. Both are of the nature of the Great Word, but until that distinction is made no world can come into existence.
Now. It is clear from what has happened that you will be able, with certain discipline, to Hear the Great Word. But you must understand that this would involve giving up -- certain things. Nothing of consequence."
"What things?"
"Certain illusions. Illusions about your nature and the nature of the world. There is nothing difficult here, my friend. Illusions, like universes, come into being and go out of being with great ease. For example, you would doubtless wish to throw away this persistent illusion of separateness, this idea of Self and Other. Both are of the nature of the Great Word."
"Separateness. You mean -- individuality. Personality. My Self."
"Well -- " Wayan hesitated. "There is only one Self. And it does not, if I may speak frankly, belong to you. It is, so to speak, on loan to you, like your pretty red automobile."
"But I have spent my entire life establishing my own individuality, my persona, my Self."
"Ah, yes," Wayan said happily. "There is always the question of bad habits, of course. Perhaps you would like to consider which is of more value to you; your habits or the Truth? Then again -- perhaps you would not."
Wayan touched my hand lightly, rose and turned back to the door of the tiny thatched hut. As he stood silhouetted in the doorway, a halo of radiance surrounding him and leaving his face in shadow, he spoke again, and his words struck me like a sledgehammer, leaving me gasping as he vanished.
"That's why we get the big bucks," Wayan said.
As he left the doorway I heard Jean Pierre say quietly, "Merci, mon ami."
"Did you hear what he said? My god, Jean Pierre, did you hear what he said?"
"At the last? Yes, he said, 'C'est comme ca que nos besoins sont bien satisfait.'"
"He was speaking English, not French!"
Jean Pierre shrugged. "It was French I heard. Wayan is, let us say -- multilingual. All the monks here are. It is said they understand the language of all creatures.
"Come along, my friend, and we will find a place for you to stay. You understand, by telling you all this, Wayan has invited you to stay. I expect you have some thinking to do."
I got unsteadily to my feet and went to the door.
"Jean-Pierre, I can't believe this is happening to me. This is a dream, it's not real."
"Well," Jean-Pierre said, "Wayan is something like a Buddhist, I think. Buddhists put considerable care into distinguishing between what is real and what is un-real."
Halfway across the compound, the ancient Wayan was walking slowly toward the outer gate, his hands at his chest in the position of meditation.
He was singing to himself.
"Cheerful little bugger isn't he?" Jean-Pierre said. "That's why I like him."
end
The Great Word
©1995 Don Berry