《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 76 (170):巴厘島文化

Bali is a tiny Hindu island located in the middle of the two-thousand-mile-long Indonesian archipelago that constitutes the most populous Muslim nation on earth. Bali is therefore a strange and wondrous thing; it should not even exist, yet does. The island's Hinduism was an export from India by way of Java. Indian traders brought the religion east during the fourth century AD. The Javanese kings founded a mighty Hindu dynasty, little of which remains today except the impressive temple ruins at Borobudur. In the sixteenth century, a violent Islamic uprising swept across the region and the Shiva-worshipping Hindu royalty escaped Java, fleeing to Bali in droves during what would be remembered as the Majapahit Exodus. The high-class, high-caste Javanese brought with them to Bali only their royal families, their craftsmen and their priests—and so it is not a wild exaggeration when people say that everyone in Bali is the descendent of either a king, a priest or an artist, and that this is why the Balinese have such pride and brilliance.

巴厘島人篤信印度教，位於長達一千公里、有全球最多穆斯林人口的印尼羣島的中央。因此巴厘島是個奇罕的地方；它甚至不該存在，卻果真存在。巴厘島的印度教從印度經由爪哇傳入。印度商人在紀元四世紀間，將其宗教帶往東方。爪哇諸王創立強大的印度教王朝，如今所剩無幾，除了壯觀的婆羅浮屠（Borobudur）寺廟廢墟之外。16世紀，一場伊斯蘭暴動席捲該區，崇拜溼婆的印度教王族成員逃離爪哇，成羣結隊避往巴厘島，後世將這段期間稱爲麻喏巴歇大遷徙（MajapahitExodus）。上層階級的爪哇人只帶了自己的皇室家族、工匠與祭司來到巴厘島——因此，據說每個巴釐人都是國王、祭司，或藝術家的後裔，並不誇大。巴釐人的驕傲與才華正源於此。

The Javanese colonists brought their Hindu caste system with them to Bali, though caste divisions were never as brutally enforced here as they once were in India. Still, the Balinese recognize a complex social hierarchy (there are five divisions of Brahmans alone) and I would have better luck personally decoding the human genome than trying to understand the intricate, interlocking clan system that still thrives here. (The writer Fred B. Eiseman's many fine essays on Balinese culture go much further into expert detail explaining these subtleties, and it is from his research that I take most of my general information, not only here but throughout this book.) Suffice it to say for our purposes that everyone in Bali is in a clan, that everyone knows which clan he is in, and that everyone knows which clan everyone else is in. And if you get kicked out of your clan for some grave disobedience, you really might as well jump into a volcano, because, honestly, you're as good as dead.

爪哇殖民者將自己的印度教種姓制度帶來巴厘島，儘管社會地位的分界線不像過去的印度那般嚴格施行。然而，巴釐人認定了一套複雜的社會等級制度（光是婆羅門即分五種）。想了解這套依然盛行此地的錯綜複雜、環環相扣的宗族制度，簡直比破解人類基因還難。（作家艾斯曼［FredB. Eiseman］寫過許多關於巴厘島文化的好文章，進一步詳細說明了這些微妙之處；我從他的研究中取得大部分資訊，不僅引用於此處，本書各篇章皆有受惠。）一言以蔽之，每個巴厘島人都屬於某一族羣，人人清楚自己屬於哪個族羣。倘若因嚴重犯規被族羣踢出去，你還不如去跳火山算了，因爲老實說，如此一來，你無異於死去。

Balinese culture is one of the most methodical systems of social and religious organization on earth, a magnificent beehive of tasks and roles and ceremonies. The Balinese are lodged, completely held, within an elaborate lattice of customs. A combination of several factors cre-ated this network, but basically we can say that Bali is what happens when the lavish rituals of traditional Hinduism are superimposed over a vast rice-growing agricultural society that operates, by necessity, with elaborate communal cooperation. Rice terraces require an unbelievable amount of shared labor, maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each Balinese village has a banjar—a united organization of citizens who administer, through consensus, the village's political and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali, the collective is absolutely more important than the individual, or nobody eats.

巴釐文化是世上最有條理的社會與宗教組織系統之一，具有井井有條的任務、角色和儀式。巴釐人鑲嵌在一套精密的習俗中。此一網路的產生，結合多種因素，但基本上可以這麼說，巴厘島的出現，是傳統印度教的豐富儀式疊置於遼闊的水稻農業社會之上的結果，這個社會有必要依賴精細的社羣合作來運作。稻米梯田需要大量的共同勞動、維護和工程始可成功。因此每個巴厘島村落都有個"裏"（banjar）——由人民聯合組織而成的機構，通過共識制定村裏的政治、經濟、宗教、農業等方面的決策。在巴厘島，團體的重要性絕對超越個人，否則誰也沒飯吃。