Courtesy of Ron Jenkins

Ida Pedanda Ketut Sidemen of Taman Gria in Intaran Sanur was cremated last month, but his legacy as one of Bali’s last great poet-priests will last long into the future.

He combined his spiritual practice as a high Brahmin priest with a love of literature that was infectious. Not only did he write classical Balinese poetry, he quoted poems written by others in a way that made literature seem essential to making sense out of our everyday world.

When asked about the problems of contemporary life he would refer to the Mahabhrata, Tantri Kamandaka, Siwagama or some other poetic text as the source of a solution.

Literature for him was a guide to survival, a blueprint for maintaining spiritual balance in a world that had lost its bearings.

His two masterworks, Patijlamit and PancaSatya, were compilations of poetic tales that conveyed life lessons with wisdom that was always practical and never pedantic.

Ida Pedanda’s vision of literature was encapsulated in his interpretation of the meaning that could be found in the name of the goddess Saraswati, the patron spirit of writing and poetic arts.

“Sara means weapon in sanskrit.” the high Hindu priest told me several years ago when I visited him at his home in Gria Taman. “Swa means line. And ti means behavior.

So Sara-swa-ti is the goddess who offers humans a weapon that will guide their behavior along the straight line of truth.”

The priest was fond of breaking down names into their roots to discover hidden meanings that others had missed, but it is his interpretation of Saraswati’s name that remains most deeply lodged in my memory. Defining the goddess of literature as the bearer of poetic weapons typified Ida Pedanda’s approach to life. To him reading was an essential activity for arming oneself against hardship. Artfully sculpted words could cut away the enemy of illusion. Poetry was an arrow aimed at the target of truth.

Ida Pedanda received visitors on the porch of a pavilion that was full of lontar manuscripts.

His home at Gria Taman was an armory of palm leaf books and he treated them with the care and respect befitting spiritually charged weapons capable of saving your life. He presented them with regular offerings of flowers and incense.

He stored them in lofty places, on the highest shelves in front of photographs of great sages, like his teacher Ida Pedanda Made Sideman, or next to the shrines of sacred masks, like the mythical Balinese beast Barong.

Each time he opened a lontar, he preceded the unfolding of its palm leaf pages with a mantra to the goddess Saraswati.

“Om Saraswati,” he intoned with his deeply resonant voice, “Gumelar Ya Nama Swaha,” a phrase that might be translated as asking the goddess to grace the opening of the book with the blessings of heaven.

Another holy mantra would accompany every closing of a book, conveying appreciation of what had been learned and commitment to the preservation of the knowledge it contained.

The priest honored his books the way samurai warriors once honored their swords.

The last time I saw him healthy, Ida Pedanda was presiding over one of his favorite activities: The singing of lontar manuscripts. The power of the words inscribed in lontar manuscripts is released most fully when those words are sung in the classical metric rhythms with which they were written.

Ida Pedanda believed so strongly in the force of those rhythms that he did not consider a poem to be a poem unless it was written in the old Balinese script.

Every Sunday night the priest would invite his neighbors to study lontar singing with him at his home in Gria Taman.

Fishermen, rice farmers, and hotel workers, among others, would gather around him to chant classical poems inscribed in traditional script on the palm leaf books he treasured. There was lots of joking, philosophizing, and sharing of food in these sessions.

The priest was passing on Bali’s collective wisdom to the next generation, giving them the weapons they would need in the battle against forgetting that so many traditional cultures have lost.

The last lontar singing session at the Gria was more elaborate than the regular Sunday evening gatherings.

Ida Pedanda had invited professional singers to chant the lontars, and he was recording their voices on tape, as if he sensed already that the day was approaching when he would no longer be around to guide the neighborhood voices in their singing of poems.

The professional performers took turns recording passages from a poem the priest had written himself.

It was a retelling of a classic story from a lontar called Siwaratri that recounted the travails of a recently deceased soul trying to make its way to heaven.

The dead man was a hunter called Lubdaka, a name which the priest had interpreted for me once before in his typically idiosyncratic fashion.

“The word lub is connected
to lupa which means to forget,” he explained.

“Dak means poor. So Lubdaka is a person who is poor in forgetting. That means he is rich in remembering. He always remembers. And he goes hunting, not necessarily to kill, but to look for something. He’s hunting for satwa.”

By using the word “satwa” to explain Lubdaka’s profession as a hunter the priest increases the story’s metaphoric power.

“Satwa” can mean ‘animal’, but it can also mean story or sacred teaching, so Ida Pedanda has retranslated the story in a way that portrays Lubdaka as someone who is hunting sacred knowledge.

This interpretation helps to clarify the mystical meaning of the “Siwaratri” story which ends with Lubdaka’s admission to heaven, in spite of the fact that he has spent his life as a hunter who killed animals, an activity whose bad karma would ordinarily send a soul to hell.

The recording of the last singing session did not go well. The cassettes got stuck in the outdated machinery he had borrowed and the tape unraveled in his hands when he removed them from the recorder.

But those who have heard Ida Pedanda Ketut Sidemen sing his version of the poem still have the opportunity of personally passing it on to others who might ask about it when the story of Lubdaka is traditionally retold on the eve of the Hindu holiday known as Siwaratrikalpa.

And if they are good at remembering, like Lubdaka was, they will suggest that the hero’s passion for hunting knowledge was the secret of his ascension to heaven.

Ida Pedanda loved the Lubdaka story so much that he had it painted in panels around the ceiling of one of his family compound pavilions.

In those paintings visitors to Gria Taman can see the humble hunter Lubdaka greeted in heaven by a golden chariot.

And those who knew the priest will understand that the weapons Lubdaka used to defeat the demon armies that tried to drag him to hell were the weapon of sacred knowledge and poetry.

These friends will take comfort in imagining that Ida Pedanda Ketut Sidemen, his generation’s most eloquent wielder of words, has been rewarded in the afterlife with a similar state of grace.

Ron Jenkins is a professor of theater at Wesleyan University. A facsimile and translation of Ida Pedanda Ketut Sideman’s Siwaratrikalpa lontar can be found in his book “The Invisible Mirror” which is available online at archive.org/details/Bali, a website created in collaboration with the Internet Archive Foundation and the Balinese Office of Culture whose goal is the preservation of Balinese lontar literature online.

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