Kirat Mundhum

Kirat Mundhum is the traditional religion of the Kirat peoples of eastern Nepal, principally the Rai and the Limbu, and its scripture, the Mundhum, is not a printed canon at all but an oral recitation carried by trained priests, called nakchhong among the Rai and phedangma and yeba among the Limbu, who transmit it within their own priestly lineages. This article names what the Mundhum is and does without repeating its words, which belong to those lineages rather than to any published edition.

What can be told publicly is the shape of the religion around that recitation: ancestor veneration and reverence for nature spirits tied to particular hills, rivers and forests, observed through rites keyed to the agricultural year rather than to a fixed liturgical calendar. Kirat religious identity has become an increasingly public and political fact in Nepal in recent decades, as Rai, Limbu and related communities have organized to have Kirat Mundhum recognized as a distinct religion in its own right rather than folded into broader regional categories, part of a wider movement among Nepal's indigenous nationalities to have their own faiths counted and named. The tradition remains a living one, carried forward by its priesthoods rather than by any text a reader could open.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Kirat Mundhum's public calendar turns twice a year around Sakela, a festival held at the full moon in spring and again in autumn under two different names for the same underlying observance. Ubhauli, the spring occasion, asks for the coming season's agricultural blessing; Udhauli, in autumn, gives thanks for the harvest already brought in, so the pair together frame the whole growing year rather than marking a single fixed date the way a birth or death anniversary would.

Communities mark Sakela with dance that enacts daily activity and animal behavior, alongside offerings of ginger, rice, homemade alcohol and tree resin, and the sacrifice of a rooster, practices that are public and widely documented rather than restricted knowledge; what the Mundhum's own words say over those offerings is a separate matter the tradition keeps within its priestly lineages. The specialists who lead this calendar are called Nakchhong among Rai communities, with comparable named roles among other Kiranti groups, and their office sits within the same ancestor centered framework the Mundhum teaches: veneration of Yuma Sammang and Tagera Ningwaphumang, and of Paruhang and Sumnima, carried in the household through the chulla, the domestic firestone understood as the dwelling place of ancestral spirits.

With 924,204 people recorded under Kiratism in Nepal's 2021 census, about 3.17 percent of the national population and concentrated among Rai, Limbu and other Kiranti communities in the east of the country, Sakela functions as the tradition's most visible and most widely shared public expression, the one part of Mundhum practice most likely to be seen by an outsider even where the fuller doctrine behind it is not.