Thousands of religious ceremonies that are held by Balinese each year for centuries give the island of Bali a unique characteristic; bring visitors to the island; drain the resources and savings of them who perform the ceremonies; give income to the suppliers of materials that are use in the ceremonies; make the Balinese to take a short leave from offices; and sometimes make them work harder to earn enough money for holding the ceremonies. In short, these ceremonies make most of the activities on the island keep on going.

Why Balinese hold thousands of ceremonies every year? There are many reasons that underlie the holding of religious ceremonies. One of them is fear of deities and God wrath. Most Balinese believe that if negligence in holding religious ceremonies incites the wrath of the deities and God. The wrath of the deities will result on punishment. The punishment does not take the form of a judgment in the afterworld, but in the form of illness, misfortune or death. This idea deities wrath (kaduken, or kasalahang) is still feared by most of Balinese.

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Paying homage and praying to a temple is not just an act of devotion to God for Balinese, it is more than just a religious activity. In socio-political context praying in a temple for a Balinese is also an act to justify his positions in the society, his position in a clan, his position in a village, etc in short praying to the temple is an act of justifying his identity.

Taman Ayun Temple

Justifying identity through worshipping in a temple is possible since most temple membership in Bali is exclusive, that is, only those who are member may worship there. One cannot as in Islam and Christianity, stop in at any temple and pray; for this privilege, in Bali someone must in some sense regular member of the congregation of the temple. From more 20,000 temples in Bali not more than five percents are public temple, where everybody can pray and pay homage and the rest of them are members only. (There are five types of temple in Bali: public temple, territorial temple, functional temple and clan temple).

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Thousands of temples that scattered all over the island of Bali are not just built for a single purpose. The function of a temple can be determined by the characteristics of the temple that totally depend on the bond that bind the temple congregations to the temple. The bond may be a social, political, economical, or genealogical bond.

The social bond can be in the form of territorial bond, and teacher – student bond. The political bond is created base on the need of the king to unite his people and territory. The economical bond is created based on the similarity of the profession, for example farmer, trader, fisherman, etc. Genealogical bond is established based on kinship or clan.

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