The Kathmandu Valley

The Newar communities of the Kathmandu Valley maintain the only surviving lineage of Sanskrit Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism outside Tibet, and it works in a way that has no equivalent elsewhere. David Gellner's study of Newar Buddhism describes a priesthood that is hereditary and householder rather than celibate and monastic.

The Vajracharya and Shakya castes are initiated into former monastery compounds, the bahas and bahis, which function as caste and ritual institutions rather than as residences for monks, and a Vajracharya priest serves client households much as a Brahmin priest does on the Hindu side. Gellner distinguishes three levels within the same tradition: the ordinary lay observance available to anyone, the monastic ideal preserved in ritual form, and the tantric initiations restricted to those entitled to them. That third level is closed. Its content is transmitted under initiation and is not published, and the atlas names the restriction rather than describing what is withheld.

The valley's Hindu and Buddhist practice is not separated by household. The same families may attend Pashupatinath and a Buddhist stupa, the same festivals draw both, and a number of deities are claimed by both traditions under different names. Newar religion is best described as one system that its own participants sort in more than one way.

The Kumari of Kathmandu is a young girl recognised as the temporary residence of a goddess, and the office sits precisely on the seam between the valley's two traditions. Michael Allen's ethnography records that she is selected from a Buddhist Newar caste, that she is worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike, and that her recognition by the head of state was historically part of what legitimated rule in the valley. The chariot festival at which she appears in public is one of the major annual events of the city. The institution is a living one with living custodians, and the atlas describes it as the community and the published ethnography report rather than reconstructing the selection or the ritual in detail. It has also changed inside living memory.

The end of the Nepali monarchy altered the political role the office had carried, and the arrangements for a Kumari's schooling and for her return to ordinary life after the office ends have been the subject of public debate and of change in Nepal. Allen's account is from the mid twentieth century and does not describe the present arrangements, so the atlas records what it establishes about the office's structure and marks the current practice as a matter on which the custodians, not this atlas, are the authority.