Baths in 16th-century Philippines

In another place and time, I was a Benedictine known as Dom Ignacio Maria. Those years are long gone but each year on July 31 I still celebrate my feast day together with Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits under whom I was educated, and in whose universities, Ateneo de Manila and Sophia University (Tokyo), I am currently privileged to teach. Each year on or before July 31 I reread the short autobiography of Ignatius but this year I also reread “Relacion de las islas Filipinas” by Pedro Chirino, which was originally published in Rome in 1604 and made more accessible in a bilingual edition of 1969 with a translation from the original Spanish by Ramon Echevarria.

Pedro Chirino (1557-1635) served in the Philippines for 12 years. He arrived in May 1590 and left in July 1602, and thus saw and described the Philippines and the Filipinos during the early years of the Spanish conquest. Perhaps the most cited chapter in his work concerns the pre-Spanish writing or baybayin. Here Chirino stated that: “So accustomed are all these islanders to writing and reading that there is scarcely a man, and much less a woman, who cannot read and write in letters proper to the island of Manila, very different from those of China, Japan, or India.” He even drew the various letters of the baybayin, explaining how this was written and read.

When some people insist that the friars destroyed all pre-Spanish culture, they should look up Chirino (who, as a Jesuit, was technically not a friar—that is, not a member of the mendicant religious orders like the Augustinians, Franciscans and Dominicans who did not figure too well in narratives of the Philippine Revolution) and appreciate that some pre-Spanish culture was actually preserved by religious orders.

What caught my eye in this rereading was Chapter 10 (“De los baños de Filipinas”), which is about baths and bathing. It made me understand where Los Baños, Laguna, got its name: It was the place for hot spring baths that were considered medicinal and was also described by Chirino in a chapter that begins thus:

“From the day they are born these islanders are raised in the water, and so from childhood both men and women swim like fish and have no need of a bridge to cross rivers.”

Although we live in an archipelago and are surrounded by bodies of water, many Filipinos grow up inland and do not know how to swim. Unlike the pre-Spanish Pinoys who saw water as a means of transport and communication, our generation describes our country as a group of islands separated by water because we have forgotten that in an earlier time our ancestors saw islands connected by water.

Chirino continued: “They bathe at all hours indiscriminately, for pleasure and cleanliness, and not even women who have just delivered avoid bathing or fail to immerse a newly born infant in the river itself or in the cold springs… They bathe crouching and almost sitting down, out of modesty, with water up to their neck and with extreme care not to expose themselves, even if there is no one around to see them… The most usual hour for the bath is at sunset, for since they cease their work then they take to the river for a restful and cooling bath, taking back for their daily needs a vessel of water on their way home… At the door of every house they keep a jar of water and whosoever comes in, whether a stranger or one of the household, draws some water from it to wash his feet before entering, especially during the muddy season. This they do with great ease by rubbing one foot against the other, the water pouring down through the floor of the house, which is all made of bamboo slats laid very close together like a grate.”

If you watch how people bathe in a stream today or wash their feet, you will realize that we still act very much as Pinoys did in the late 16th century.

What I found fascinating was Chirino’s description of bathing after coming from a funeral: “In the island of Panay I saw all the people that were following a funeral, immediately upon leaving the church after the service, like the Jews go straight to the river for a bath, although they had no knowledge of this obsolete law.”

Today people go to wakes in the evening and bathe when they return home, but it is also customary to stop over at a convenience store and have a drink because one must not bring death home. Rather, you leave death in the convenience store.

The only thing we don’t seem to do as much today is anointing the head or the hair with oil, although we probably modified this with shampoo and conditioner:

“Upon coming out of their bath they anoint the head with sesame oil mixed with civet, which as we shall describe later abounds in the territory, and even on other occasions they are much given to anointing their heads for comfort and embellishment, especially among women and children.”

Chirino’s description of the trip along the Pasig from Manila to Laguna may be obsolete because we now use traffic-filled roads and bridges rather than waterways, but his description of how lush and restful Laguna was still rings true. When we consider modern problems like traffic, pollution, flooding, and overpopulation, we rarely look back at the past where some of the solutions lie.

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