What is Daya Putih? (English)Die englische Fassung des Daya-Putih-Artikels — inhaltsgleich mit der deutschen (beide Stand nach der Mangku-Weihe, Dez. 2025).

Daya Putih is a holistic system. It unites yoga, tantric energy and body work, elements of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions of Java and Bali, and classical Buddhist meditation — concentration, mindfulness, insight. As much as it carries, it has a single measure by which everything is aligned: the wholesome and the Noble Eightfold Path. It is not the multiplicity of means that defines the path, but the direction in which they point.

This multiplicity is not a modern invention and not a collection of fragments. It has an origin, an architecture and a history — and with that this document begins.

When Buddhism came to Java and Sumatra by the sea routes, it came not as a bare teaching but as the complete system of its age: mental cultivation and ritual, ethics and energy work, mantra, breath and visualization within one house. The most important surviving textbook of Old Javanese Buddhism, the Sang Hyang Kamahāyānikan of the tenth century, shows this architecture clearly: at the bottom the foundation of ethical training and the perfections, the pāramitās; above it the superstructure of tantric practice — mantra, breath control, the building of the inner maṇḍala within one’s own body; and as its summit advaya, the overcoming of duality.

Java thus did not mix Buddhism with something foreign. It received it just as the great Indian source-centres themselves taught it at the time — and preserved it in this form over centuries, developed it further, and brought it into an ordered relationship with the Śaiva tradition. In Bali this heritage lives on to this day: in the liturgies of the high priests and in the daily service of the temple priests, the pamangku — one of the few unbroken practice lineages of pre-modern Southeast Asian tantra at all.

Daya Putih stands within this architecture. Its foundation is sīla and the training of the mind; its superstructure is the work with body, breath and life-force; its summit is the insight that no longer finds any duality. Whoever practises Daya Putih practises nothing thrown together at random — he inhabits a house that has been built to the same plan for more than a thousand years.

Honesty belongs to this house: what lives on unbroken in Bali is the continuity of ritual and priesthood — not a meditation school documentable without gaps. And present-day Vipassanā is, for its part, a modern recovery from old texts. Both streams are transmitted each in its own way: the one through living ritual, the other through preserved scripture. Precisely therein they complement each other.

Whoever understands the two streams that flow together in Daya Putih recognizes two different basic movements of the mind.

The one is the movement of release: to see through what one took to be oneself. This is the path of insight as the Theravāda teaches it — the body is contemplated, feeling, mind, phenomena; what is impermanent is seen as impermanent, and grasping loosens. This movement takes apart, sobers, frees through seeing.

The other is the movement of transformation: to refine the raw, to gather the scattered, to bring the force of life into a wholesome form. This is the movement of tantric practice — the body is not only seen through but also inhabited; breath, energy and attention are ordered until the human being becomes a vessel of the wholesome.

The two movements do not contradict each other; they act at different points. Transformation prepares the ground and gives the human being stance, warmth and strength. Release completes what no transformation can accomplish: the direct seeing that in all of this no fixed self is to be found. Daya Putih holds both movements — and does not confuse them.

If we start from the premise that every attempt, within saṃsāra — within the dual world — to be something or to find lasting happiness must ultimately fail, because everything is anicca, impermanent, and none of it is Nibbāna, that still, unconditioned state which neither arises nor passes away: then that is the ideal. The reality, however, is that the citta, as long as perfect awakening is not realized, again and again grasps after objects within saṃsāra.

Because this is so, we remain under the ignorance of a self and suffer from wanting-to-have and not-wanting-to-have. From the identification with the body and with much else, conflicts arise. Precisely here Daya Putih takes hold — not beyond the path but in the midst of it: it supports us in walking the Noble Eightfold Path, in training in bhāvanā, in cultivating the wholesome and refraining from the unwholesome.

One thing should stand clear from the outset: liberation comes through insight alone — through the direct seeing of anicca, dukkha and anattā, as it ripens in Vipassanā. No force changes that, nor should it.

Yet this is no diminishment of the second track, but its right placement. The Javanese system, too, never played the two tracks off against each other: the pāramitā training carried the tantric path, and the tantric path carried the human being — up to the summit, at which only insight itself leads further. The Buddha never belittled supportive conditions; of noble friendship he said it was not a part of the holy life but its whole. Into this order Daya Putih belongs: as the track that carries, strengthens and gathers the human being, so that the track of insight can lead him to the goal. Two tracks — one direction.

Daya — the power, the capacity, the living energy. Putih — the white, the pure, the bright. Daya Putih means: the life-force in its pure, wholesome form.

Many people in today’s society have lost the natural will to live and the ability to stand up uprightly for themselves. We adapt, wish to be loved and accepted, make ourselves smaller than we are. Here a fine but load-bearing distinction is needed: making oneself small out of fear is not selflessness in the sense of the Dhamma. Anattā — the insight that no fixed, abiding self is to be found — is freedom, not constriction; it loosens grasping, not the human being. Anxious self-denial, by contrast, is itself a form of suffering. From the outside the two look alike — “no I” here, “no I” there — yet the one is liberation, the other a fetter.

Before a person can see through his self, he must first be allowed to inhabit it uprightly. Precisely here the movement of transformation works: it releases the life-force from the narrowness of adaptation — not to feed an ego, but to prepare the ground on which true insight can ripen.

In today’s world one of two things often happens: people suppress their needs, feelings and impulses over a long time — or the inner tension grows too great and discharges in an unwholesome way, painful for themselves and for those around them.

Between these two abysses lies the way the Buddha pointed out in his first discourse: the Middle Way between devotion to sense-pleasure and self-mortification. Daya Putih trains this middle — neither to numb the life-force nor to act it out blindly, but to bring it to expression consciously, responsibly and wholesomely. The way there is not repression but mindfulness: a feeling, an impulse is clearly recognized, understood — and thereby loses its compulsive power. What has been clearly seen need neither be held down nor acted out.

Nowhere do the two basic movements show themselves as clearly as in the body.

For the track of insight the body is an object of sobering: thirty-two parts, four elements, subject to aging and decay. This contemplation is wholesome because it loosens grasping and breaks the denial of death.

For the Javanese-Balinese track the same body is temple and instrument: the place where breath is guided, energy ordered and the wholesome embodied. In the daily ritual of the Balinese priest the body is purified, articulated and made a vessel — and what it receives does not remain with it: it is passed on to the community as holy water, as tīrtha. Salvation that is shared, instead of ending in the individual.

Daya Putih holds both gazes, and it does not mix them. In the body and energy work the body is honoured, cared for and used as a tool of the wholesome; in insight meditation the same body is soberly seen through. Each practice follows its own grammar. This is not inconsistency but old discipline: the Javanese tradition, too, let the methods stand separately side by side and did not assert their unity on the level of forms, but only on the final level of truth.

That this is a life in beauty is more than an image. In the Abhidhamma the wholesome states of consciousness are called sobhana — the beautiful ones. Beauty here does not mean the pleasant of the senses, which passes away with it, but the character of a mind that works free of greed, hatred and delusion. To “live the life-force in beauty” therefore means: to bring it to expression in harmony with the Eightfold Path and with kindly, loving, wholesome qualities — to dwell in the space of these beautiful states of consciousness.

Thus Daya Putih reaches into the three trainings without displacing any. In sīla it strengthens the power to act wholesomely in everyday life, even where it costs effort. In samādhi it helps not to lose the mind in turmoil, but to hold it in the still and clear. And where ethics and concentration carry, paññā, wisdom, can ripen more undisturbed. Insight itself, however, remains the practitioner’s own — it cannot be lent, only won through one’s own seeing.

With the progressive cultivation of wholesome qualities, trust in one’s own intuition grows. This intuition is not simply a spontaneous notion or an arbitrary impulse. What is here called “intuition” is the ripened inclination of a mind that has been wholesomely formed through long practice. A quality that has arisen often enough becomes second nature; the mind turns to the wholesome without having to win it anew each time. Thus the Dhamma works like a magnet: the more the wholesome is cultivated, the more strongly the wholesome attracts.

In this sense intuition can be understood as inner guidance. What is meant, however, is not a personal god and no external higher power, but the working of the Dhamma itself: the interplay of many wholesome qualities cultivated over a long time through a corresponding way of life. No hand steers from outside; it is the ripening of the causes that shows the way from within.

In the discrepancy that life again and again imposes on us — through our own inadequacies as well as in the friction with the world — we meet conflict, joy and sorrow. Daya Putih supports us in transforming these experiences instead of being transformed by them, so that the wholesome grows from them. This is the movement of transformation in the small, in the midst of the day: what strikes us is neither suppressed nor acted out, but made the raw material of practice. Thus, little by little, the perfections gather, the pāramitās; the factors of awakening ripen further — until at last the citta takes liberation itself as its object.

Formal meditation is a central component of Daya Putih. This includes classical Buddhist meditation as well as retreats and intensive phases of practice, in which concentration, mindfulness and insight are deepened. Especially in retreat — in an environment as undisturbed as possible, fully gathered on meditation — sati-sampajañña and bhāvanā unfold in their full power. In this stillness the mind is receptive, grasping has come to rest, and what is taken in here sits deep.

Daya Putih, however, does not confine itself to formal practice. The goal is not only to develop clarity and wholesome states of mind on the cushion, but to carry these qualities into the whole of everyday life. The real challenge often begins where formal meditation ends: in contact with people, in relationships, in responsibility, in conflicts, in success and failure. There it shows how deeply the practice is anchored.

Daya Putih supports precisely this transition. Formal practice forms the foundation; life itself becomes the real field of practice, on which wisdom, compassion, inner stability and wholesome action prove themselves. Thus the Noble Eightfold Path is practised not only during particular times of training but, step by step, becomes lived reality. This too is old heritage: the Javanese-Balinese track was never a monastic track alone — from of old it bound family, community and service into salvation.

Precisely as a practitioner who does not live in a monastery but stands in the midst of everyday life, the tension is felt again and again. On the one hand we strive to live in sīla, samādhi and paññā and to direct the mind toward liberation. On the other hand we move in a world often shaped by other values: many seek their happiness outside — in recognition, possession, security, power. Instincts and drives are acted out unbridled, out of greed, fear or the need for control. Thus conflicts, disappointments and suffering arise.

We all know the figure — sometimes from the mirror: the yogi who floats through the world with a gentle “shanti, shanti, shanti”, bestowing an understanding smile on everyone, and yet inwardly flinches the moment someone pushes ahead at the checkout. The gentleness is sincerely meant — and at the same time easily becomes a mask. Sometimes it conceals that within it has long been seething; sometimes it conceals that one simply does not dare to stand clear and upright. True peace is neither of the two.

Often there lives in this, consciously or unconsciously, the hope that others will one day recognize what is wholesome: if only they were finally more understanding, more mindful, more loving. Yet precisely here lies a subtle form of clinging. We expect from the outside something that, out of its own conditions, it often cannot give at all. Others follow their causes, as a river follows its gradient; the suffering does not sit in the river, but in our expectation that it might flow uphill.

Here Daya Putih is a support. It does not help to change the world, but to strengthen one’s own inner stability: to stay in contact with the forces of life without losing the wholesome direction. Thus a maturity arises in which neither blind adaptation nor blind rebellion is needed. One becomes neither a victim of circumstances nor hardens in resistance; one learns to be powerful and loving at once.

Daya Putih reminds us that spiritual development does not mean becoming weak, passive or conflict-shy. The Buddha too was not soft: mettā, loving-kindness, is a force and not a giving-in; patience is strength and not submission. The perfections carry both sides within them — the gentle: kindness, compassion, giving, patience; and the powerful: energy, resolve, wisdom. Maturity means joining the two: consciously integrating courage, clarity and assertiveness and letting them be permeated by the Dhamma.

If, while reading, you have recognized yourself here or there and secretly still hope the waterfall will one day move uphill, then perhaps the moment has come to change something — not in the world, but in your own attitude toward it. A large part of our life passes in silent struggle against the nature of things; precisely this expectation produces most of the additional suffering.

Nowhere is this felt as immediately as in becoming a parent. Children are still entirely instinctive; they express their needs unfiltered and ceaselessly test boundaries. This makes parenthood one of the most powerful practices of all. Whoever does not learn here to set healthy boundaries while remaining loving soon runs into difficulty. One often sees today the opposite: parents who feel overwhelmed, and children who do not receive the hold they need in order to grow — suffering on both sides.

Here shows what the gentle yogi already hinted at: yieldingness is not the same as kindness. To spare a child every boundary does not give it more love, but less hold. The more mature form of affection is the one that can also say no — clearly, without harshness, without losing warmth. Daya Putih helps to find precisely this ability again: to stand up for oneself and others without injuring; to set boundaries without losing the connection to compassion and wisdom.

The same principles show themselves wherever people take responsibility: in leaders, teachers, therapists, entrepreneurs, in social projects. As soon as it is no longer only about one’s own needs but about the well-being of others or the success of a common cause, we touch our limits. Behind a need for harmony and conflict-avoidance such a task cannot be fulfilled lastingly. Sooner or later it becomes necessary to decide, to set boundaries, to create clarity and to bear the unpleasant.

Here lies the fine line on which everything is decided — not in the what, but in the whence. The same clear boundary, the same decision, can come from very different roots: from greed, fear and the need for control — or from non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion, from wisdom and compassion. From the outside the two may look the same; their fruit is different. Precisely in this distinction lies the real practice.

The greater the responsibility, the clearer it becomes: spiritual development does not end on the meditation cushion. It shows itself in relationships, in decisions, in dealings with people. Whoever bears responsibility and wants to act wholesomely needs precisely those abilities that Daya Putih fosters: inner stability, clarity, courage, compassion — and the ability to act powerfully without losing the connection to wisdom.

How this attitude expresses itself in the concrete handling of conflict can be described in four stations.

The first station consists in living in such a way that conflicts, as far as possible, do not arise at all — in harmony with oneself and with the environment. We attend to the health of body and mind, cultivate wholesome qualities and walk the way of sīla, samādhi and paññā. At the same time we fit ourselves into the natural flow of things: everywhere giving and taking, activity and rest, in-breath and out-breath alternate. Whoever lives in harmony with this change — with anicca itself — grasps less against the current and produces less friction. That is the first and highest form of conflict resolution. Yet because everyone brings different needs, conditionings and views, conflicts arise nonetheless.

The second station consists in evading a conflict in time. When we perceive bodily or mental warning signs, we act early. Likewise in dealing with others: someone who is upset we need not pour more oil on the fire; often it is wiser to step back. The Buddha himself once met an insult with the image that a gift one does not accept remains with the giver. Astonishingly many conflicts resolve themselves in this way.

But sometimes warning signs were long ignored; then evading no longer suffices — the conflict follows us. Thus we come to the third station: to stop, turn around and look the conflict in the face. Now the question is: what does this situation need in order to dissolve into harmony? The goal is a solution in which the legitimate needs of all involved find a place and no one has to lose needlessly. Afterward there stand not victor and vanquished, but people who together have found something that holds. That demands courage, honesty, compassion and the willingness truly to listen.

There are situations in which even that no longer suffices. With this we come to the fourth station: the actual attack — a serious illness, a strongly destructive state of mind, or a concrete attack from outside. Here the protection of life and the warding-off of harm stand in the foreground. And yet the basic attitude remains wholesome: the aim is not retaliation but to protect oneself and others while causing as little additional harm as possible — as much as necessary, as little as possible. Here too it is not the what that decides but the whence: does the action spring from hatred or from clarity? As long as it comes from responsibility and seeks to lessen suffering, even the resolute, warding act remains connected with the Dhamma.

Some take gentleness, generosity and friendliness for signs of weakness. And it does happen that a person actually hides behind them — does not want to stand out, avoids every conflict. Yet not every restraint springs from insecurity, and not every friendliness is weakness.

There are people who consciously renounce aggression, the will to be right and constant readiness to fight — not because they could not assert themselves, but because they understand the consequences of their actions. They need not win every fight, need not answer every provocation, need not use every opportunity to prove their strength. From the outside they sometimes seem like losers — too yielding, too quiet. In reality they have recognized something hidden from many: that not every victory is a gain and not every defeat a loss. Victory and defeat belong to the things that come and go; the inwardly steadfast one does not measure his worth by them.

The Dhammapada already says that whoever in battle conquers a thousand times a thousand people accomplishes less than the one who conquers himself. Whoever has overcome himself need not constantly overcome others; whoever is inwardly steadfast needs no continual confirmation; and whoever knows his strength need not prove it at every opportunity.

One last question remains, and it deserves an honest answer. The track of insight teaches that no self and no ultimate ground of being is to be found. The Javanese-Balinese track speaks of the Highest, which is realized. Can these two statements be equated conceptually? No — not without bending one side.

The old tradition of Java found an answer to this that holds to this day. It did not mix the paths: each liturgy kept its own form, each method its own grammar. And it did not assert unity on the level of forms, but only on the final level — in the words of the poet Mpu Tantular: bhinnêka tunggal ika — it is different, and yet one; there is no twofold truth.

This too is the attitude of Daya Putih. Insight meditation is practised according to its own grammar, the body and energy work according to its own. The question of their ultimate unity is not conceptually forced, but held open as a contemplative question — as something that is realized, not asserted.

Thus Vipassanā and Daya Putih, meditation and everyday life, do not stand against each other: the one deepens insight and points to the goal; the other lets the wholesome carry through the ordinary day. Together they yield not a divided but a continuous life — one in which beauty and the wholesome are not confined to the time of practice but reach into the last corner of everyday life. And both point in the same direction: that the mind inclines more and more to the wholesome, until at last it grasps nothing conditioned any more.

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Ida Sri Bhagawan Ageng Nabe Kanjeng Panembahan Jawi Acarya Daksa Manuaba, formerly known as the Javanese artist Kanjeng Madi Kertonegoro, is the Maha Guru and lineage holder of Daya Putih. A painter, folklorist, storyteller and peace activist, he settled in Ubud, Bali, where he founded the Future Art Gallery. He became internationally known after Alice Walker and Robert Allen discovered his work in Ubud in 1986 and published The Spirit Journey: Stories and Paintings of Bali through Wild Trees Press. His other works include Man from Behind the Mist, documenting the life and traditions of the heron village of Petulu.

Following many years of esoteric training, he was consecrated as lineage holder of Daya Putih, a spiritual tradition rooted in the Śiva-Buddha culture of pre-modern Indonesia. In the 1980s he began opening this previously restricted teaching to Western students. On 19 February 2014 he received the high-priest ordination (padiksan) at Griya Agung Bangkasa under his Guru Nabe, Ida Pandita Mpu Nabe Siwa Putra Prama Daksa Manuaba, becoming a Śiva-Buddha high priest. He serves on the Sabha Pandita of the national Hindu council (PHDI) and leads the Daya Putih Foundation in Ubud, Bali.

[Photograph of Ida Panembahan Jawi to be added.]

[To be confirmed: place and date of birth; academic background; predecessor in the Daya Putih lineage.]

Mangku Claudio Fontanive-von Glenck (born 8 February 1978 in Switzerland) is, together with his wife Mangku Margarete Fontanive-von Glenck, the founder of Karunahaus, a Dharma centre in Unterwasser, Switzerland, established in 2018. For more than two decades he has practised Buddhist meditation, primarily within the Theravāda and Vipassanā traditions, and teaches meditation at Karunahaus; his practice includes both guided and solitary retreats and the study of the early Buddhist texts and their practical application.

Since 2009 he has trained under Ida Sri Bhagawan Ageng Nabe Kanjeng Panembahan Jawi Acarya Daksa Manuaba in the tradition of Daya Putih, integrating its Śiva-Buddha approach to body, energy and daily life with the path of insight taught in the Theravāda tradition. On 29 December 2025 he and his wife were consecrated as Mangku (Śiva-Buddha priests) by Ida Panembahan Jawi, becoming part of the living priestly lineage of Bali and Java.

His work focuses on making contemplative practice accessible within ordinary life by bringing together meditation, ethical cultivation, personal development and the wisdom traditions of Southeast Asia. In addition to his spiritual work, he completed professional training in Essential Psychotherapy in 2024.

Mangku Claudio and Mangku Margarete Fontanive-von Glenck with their children, Bali.