Introduction
At the river's elbow where the water turns slow and green, there stands a tree whose stories have outlived the hands that first bound its trunk with cloth. The Dayak call it Batang Garing — the Tree of Life — and around its roots the village remembers how sky and soil first learned to speak to one another. This is not a single tale but a layered telling: a cosmology carved into beams of longhouses, embroidered into skirts, inked into the tattoos on elders' arms, shaped in the careful patterns of woodcarving and song. To approach the Batang Garing is to enter a map of meaning. Its lower roots are the underworld's doorway, where the dead return to the slow rhythm of earthworms and the soft pulse of hidden springs; its massive trunk is the human world, the place of planting, hunting, laughter, and sorrow; its crown leans toward the open sky, where birds and thunder and ancestors with lanterns walk between the clouds. For the Dayak, the tree is not mere wood and leaf. It is an axis, a moral compass, a living scripture through which questions of belonging, duty, mourning, and celebration are answered. In the months when fruit is scarce and the river narrows, families come with offerings: betel, woven cloth, and songs whose syllables press like beads against the bark. They bind dyed threads to the trunk to mark births and rites of passage, to ask the tree to remember a name or to forgive a misdeed. The Batang Garing's presence shapes time — planting seasons are planned by its bloom, marriages are blessed beneath its shade, and children learn to listen because their elders listened first to the creak of its branches. This story unfolds in the slow voice of the forest, carrying the salt of river spray and the hum of insects, but it is told through human memory: an elder's recollection, a carver's dream, a child's question. Through myth and ritual we will trace why Batang Garing remains the living axis of Dayak life: how it binds the upper and lower worlds, how it offers lessons in stewardship, and how, in an age of change, a people keep an old conversation with nature alive.
Origins: The Birth of the Axis
In the beginning, according to the telling elders pass down by riverlight, the world was a thinner place where sky and soil lived like strangers in the same house. The sky hung close enough to catch fish in its folds, and the earth kept watch over luminous caves that no one dared enter. People moved between these spaces without much thought, taking fruit where the sky shed it and bringing fire down into hollows that hummed with unknown currents. Then came a child, born of the river's edge and raised by an old woman who spoke to the wind like a companion. The child was named Garing — a name that meant 'upright' and 'anchor' in the songs. Garing grew with the river in his veins and the patience of the forest in his hands. He could hear hidden things: the thin sigh of a seed settling into rot, the tales that insects told beneath leaves. He noticed how the dead animals' bones lay in the undergrowth as if waiting for a voice to call them home. Watching the world, he thought the division between sky and soil made the world lonelier, and he wished for a single living thing that might stitch them together.
So Garing climbed. He climbed a spit of land, a steep mound of root and stone where the river curbed, and he planted his walking staff into the ground. He walked away for a single night, and when dawn followed him back he found a young trunk had sprouted and grown, thickening overnight like a promise. The tree grew both upward and downward — its roots braided with hidden streams and its branches leaned to greet the clouds. The villagers called it Batang Garing, the tree of the man who sowed connection where separation had been.
As the tree spread its crown, birds began to speak with different words, carrying stories from high to low. Ancestors, who once whispered only in dreams, descended to leave shells and beads at the foot of the trunk. The underworld, which had been a place of hunger and silence, softened at the touch of the roots; roots opened like hands and showed that below the surface life did not end but continued in slow, deliberate exchange. The Batang Garing thus became the living axis within village cosmology: a conduit through which offerings, prayers, and debts moved between layers of being. It made a place for rites that would map human life onto the natural world. When a boy came of age, he would be led around the trunk three times and asked to listen for the root's reply. When a woman lost a child, she did not return to the underworld alone; she placed the child's small cloth upon the roots and left the village to walk downriver with the elders, singing the child's name into every bend.
The stories say that the Batang Garing remembers. It remembers who loved it and who cut it for fire. Its rings hold seasons, droughts, disputes, and reconciliations. Carvings on posts in longhouses show stylized forms of the tree, a reminder carved in wood about wood itself: the same force that bends a branch can hold a roof above a family. Over generations, the village learned rituals that honored the tree's remembering. They wove the seasons to its sprouting: planting when its small flowers opened like nets, harvesting when its leaves browned and fell like letters. Through myth, the Batang Garing taught a practical stewardship. It became taboo to fell a tree of a certain size near the village unless an elder judged the necessity and the tree was first asked in ritual. In this way, faith and survival braided into a single practice.
Beyond practical function, the tree shaped ethical life. Stories told around the flames emphasized reciprocity: whatever humans took had to be acknowledged in kind. The Batang Garing accepted offerings — rice, cloth, the smoked tongues of river fish — and in exchange it promised that hunters would not return empty-handed and that storms would pass without ripping out the roots of homes. Elders explained that reciprocity was not a ledger but a conversation; when a family failed to return an offering, misfortune could follow, not as punishment but as a reminder to listen. Thus the Batang Garing's role as the axis was both metaphysical and municipal. It held together the village's sense of place and the invisible stitches of obligation to the unseen. To this day, some elders say that when you stand with your back against its trunk you can feel the slow pulse of the seasons like a heartbeat. The tree's bark is marked by centuries of threads, small carvings, and the patina of human touch. Each mark is a memory, each knot a decision made by those who lived alongside it.
In time, the Batang Garing's lore travelled along the river, carried by traders and by those who married into other villages. The myth adapted: names shifted, offerings changed, but the constant remained — a tree that held the worlds together, a living axis that taught people how to live within an interwoven cosmos. Poets and carvers patterned the motif into screens and spear butts, ensuring the image of that upright, remembering tree would cross between firelit houses and into the wider world. Through song and ritual the Batang Garing kept its authority in the village: the living axis anchored the people's stories to the land, binding history and present into a single, continuing narrative.
Rituals, Carving, and the Living Archive
The Batang Garing functions as a living archive — a place where memory is written in ritual gestures and the grain of wood. The Dayak practice surrounding the tree blends craft and cosmology, because for them technique is a form of devotion. Wooden posts taken from trees other than the Batang Garing are carved with its likeness: concentric rings symbolizing the tree's knowledge and roots that double into rivers. Carving is an act of remembering; the carver's knife follows lines learned from ancestors and songs that tell where to place each motif. Beginning carvers are instructed to listen before cutting: to sit at the tree's base, to feel the temperature of the air moving through its leaves, and to hear the water that keeps its roots alive. Only after these quiet hours do hands pick up blades, because the tree's form must be taken into memory before it is transformed into object. These crafted objects become portable pages of the same archive, carried into new homes, across canoes, into marriage trousseaus and trade.
Ritual surrounding the Batang Garing covers life in stages. Babies are introduced to the axis by having a strand of their umbilical cord buried at the tree's root: a physical tether between newborn and the village's long memory. Coming-of-age ceremonies ask adolescents to climb the lower limbs and whisper promises into knots drilled for the purpose; those promises are then tightened into the wood. Marriages include the tying of a groom's parang and a bride's weaving tools to lower branches while elders chant the lineage of both families; the tree stands witness, a living guarantee that vows are not only a pact between two people but a binding between generations. Funerary rites are perhaps the most elaborate: when someone dies, family members bring fire to the tree's foot and call the deceased's name three times, offering smoked fish, rice, and sometimes a small carved effigy. The Batang Garing's roots are said to guide the spirit downward into the soft dark, where it will be cradled by ancestral hands until the next cycle.
Every ritual leaves a trace. Threads, beads, and offerings weather and rot, but their memory is recorded by the tree as a ring in its tissue and in the villages' stories. Carved posts in longhouses show stylized trees flanked by figures performing these rituals. The iconography is both instruction manual and hymn: it tells the viewer where to place offerings, how to speak the old prayers, and what debts to acknowledge. Because memory is communal, the stories attached to Batang Garing allow rights and responsibilities to be inherited. If a family disputes land use or a claim to a canoe, elders can call on the tree as witness — not in the way a modern court does, but through shared recollection and the weight of ritual precedent.
Beyond the village, the Batang Garing's image traveled across rivers and hills to trade networks where Dayak communities met Malay merchants, Chinese traders, and seafarers. Traders might not have grasped the tree's religious dimensions, but they recognized its social function. A carved panel displayed in a longhouse's public room signaled more than beauty; it declared the household's obligations to its ancestors and its respect for reciprocity with the forest. The tree's motifs thus became a form of cultural currency, an aesthetic vocabulary understood across many social interactions, from marriage negotiations to peace pacts.
Modernity complicated the tree's life. Roads and logging creeps into the forest, and young people sometimes leave for cities, carrying less day-to-day contact with the Batang Garing. Yet even in this flux, the tree's rituals adapt. Some communities keep the tree as a center for festivals that attract visitors and scholars, turning ceremony into both cultural preservation and an income source. Others create replicas of the Batang Garing motif in public art and market crafts, paying homage while reshaping practice for economic survival. This process invites debate: can commodifying ritual elements preserve them, or does it hollow them? Elders argue that as long as ceremony is rooted in intention and not only in performance, the core teaching remains: reciprocity, remembrance, and respect for the living world. They tell younger generations that a photograph cannot replace the feeling of leaning one's forehead against rough bark and hearing the hollow, patient sound of a world that has endured many seasons. It is this physical encounter — the cold of the trunk in the evening, the sound of root-water moving underground — that keeps the Batang Garing an active participant in social life rather than a static emblem.
Carvers continue to teach apprentices, telling stories that encode ethical lessons. One such tale explains why certain patterns are carved only by those who have tended the tree: a lazy craftsman who attempted to copy the Batang Garing's motif without listening to the tree's whisper found that his work always splintered. The story serves both as a lesson in technique and a moral allegory: knowledge gained without relationship leads to brittle outcomes. For communities facing external pressures, these lessons guide decisions about land, resource sharing, and who can claim what right. The Batang Garing, then, remains not only a symbol of unity between sky and soil but also a practical model of governance, a living archive where social memory is stored and retrieved through ritual practice and craft.
Conclusion
To speak of the Batang Garing is to speak of continuity shaped by reciprocity: a living axis that steadies a people between sky and root, between the bright trade routes above the water and the dark chambers beneath. In the tree's shade, memory and obligation become visible acts — tied threads, carved patterns, offerings that smell of smoke and river. As modern pressures press in, the Batang Garing's lessons remain urgent: steward what sustains you, let your promises be witnessed, and remember that life is braided through many layers. The tree is a teacher of patience, showing that small acts — a scarf tied to the trunk, a carved post raised in a longhouse — accumulate into durable social contracts. If outsiders take a fragment of its image for markets and museums, they can at least carry away an invitation: to consider how the things we call sacred are sustained by daily practice and by the willingness to listen. The Dayak keep listening. They mend, they carve, they tie new threads to old knots, and in doing so they keep a conversation alive between world above and world below. The Batang Garing, older than any single generation, continues to grow. It holds its crown to the clouds and roots to the deep, inviting every passerby to pause, to touch, and to remember that the earth itself is a story still being told.
