Bud I Was Bored.

You know when you get bored and you see a nifty word you google its meaning and as you compulsively traverse the links you end up reading about something else completely different but fascinating and yet somehow they seem to connect together in ways you hadn’t thought about before…

yeah okay have you done that?

No?

So, I was googling the word Ikhlas which somehow led me on to the words…

‘Ibada, ‘Ubudiya, ‘Ubuda and ‘Abd.

They’re arabic words that revolve around the concept of devotion, albeit with different nuances. They do a better job of explaining than I do. I read about two paragraphs and got a little distracted. It struck me that these arabic words sounds like the Indonesian word for culture.

Budaya

Which is in actual fact, the plural form of Budi. It turns out there’s a huge philosophical discourse on this word which is central to Indonesian philosophy. According to wiki, the oldest definition came from Serat Centhini:

Wujud tanpa kahanan puniki.Ing dalem kak sajati lantaran. Inggih budi lantarané. Sarupa wujud ing hu. Pan jumeneng Muhammad latip. Mustakik ing Hyang Suksma. Kenyatanipun. Budi wujud ing Hyang Suksma. Inggih budi inggih Hyang kang Mahasuci. Budi tatabonira

English translation:

This being without existence is between the true reality. It has a mediation which is called Budi. Budi is similar to God’s being. Budi is also called the spiritual Muhammad. It is a manifestation of the Spirit. Budi is the being of the Spirit and it is the All-Pure. Budi is its peaceful place.

I have to admit, I don’t really know what this is trying to say. My guess is that culture are acts of devotion towards some entity in the astral plane, some funky substance that mediates existence maybe? It would explain that state of complete and total rapture before the stage, that reverence for the audience and to move as though in a trance, possessed. You can see that at the highest level of performance art particularly where there’s a certain degree of bodily harm involved like Thaipusam where you poke metal things through your flesh and Tarian Piring where you dance with ceramic plates that break. They really do look possessed.

I know this isn’t very coherent. I’m only writing this down so I won’t lose my thought.

If the very beginnings of art stems from a need to express and connect with some divine entity (think Sistine Chapel, Borobudur, Pyramids – heey notice how these gigantic temples sacrificed plenty of humans to make) what happens if art is ’secular’? It’s just a question really. Is contemporary art secular? Is that why they usually don’t make sense? Or if they do make sense, is that they their message sometimes sounds really contrived and shallow?

But back to the word!

‘Ibada, ‘Ubudiya, ‘Ubuda, ‘Abd, Budaya, Budi

It looks like the root of it all is “bud”. Break it down to the morpheme, the smallest unit of letters that has semantic meaning (hah! I still remember my Psych101), it looks like the English word for ‘bud’…. y’know like the beginnings of leaves and flowers.

okay it’s 4am and I can’t be arsed to look up the etymology for the English word ‘bud’. Although traversing that link into botany will probably lead me to some more nonsense. Tracing budi ought to have led me to bodhi which is a sanskrit word that means wisdom. I think?

I’m not insane for thinking all of this connects right? Hey we’ve gone from Arabic to Bahasa Indonesia taking a detour to English and then coming back to Sanskrit! I need to start hanging out in the library again. Just for fun. This would make the most confusing anecdote to drop in a conversation.

Goodnight.