Batara Guru

Accounts vary by region. In Batak myth Batara Guru is one of the upper-world gods (Debata na Tolu) born in a cosmogonic birth motif (eggs hatched by a divine hen) and is the divine father whose daughter (in fragmentary flood accounts named Puti-orla-bulan or Siboru Deak Parujar) is sent to recover the earth from the abyss in a flood narrative. In Bugis tradition a divine figure named La Togeq Langiq (identified with Batara Guru) is described as being sent to earth to cultivate it in human form. In Indonesian Hindu and Javanese contexts Batara Guru is presented as the guru-aspect of Siwa/Shiva and the primordial teacher among the gods.

Descriptions differ by local performance and cosmology. In Javanese wayang kulit Batara Guru is uniquely depicted with feet facing forward, four hands, pointed canine teeth, a blue neck, paralyzed legs, and riding the vahana Nandini (the cow). In Luwu ethnographic description (Errington) he is characterized metaphysically as formless, potent, invisible and unlocatable—"perfectly one without form who is everything, everywhere all the time." Bugis material implies an incarnate form when sent to earth but does not provide a single standardized anthropomorphic portrait.

Regionally specific roles include: creator and world-recoverer in Batak flood material (sending his daughter to recover the earth from the abyss); supreme spiritual teacher and revealer in Indonesian Hindu and Javanese formulations (the guru or Dakshinamurti aspect of Shiva, giver of revelation and spiritual authority); ancestor and progenitor who begets lineages and important mythic descendants in Batak and Bugis traditions (e.g., Bugis filiations such as Batara Lattuq and the ancestry connected to Sawerigading in Sureq Galigo). Sources also describe him as syncretically identified with or described as transcending Indian categories (Shiva and, in some summaries, broader categories such as Brahma, Vishnu and Buddha) in localized Indonesian theology.