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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu's Durbar Square lives Nepal's famous Living Goddess -a child as young as three who is chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths to watch over the country and protect its people. To Nepalis she is the embodiment of Devi (the universal goddess) and for centuries their Hindu kings have sought her blessing to legitimize their rule. Legends swirl about her, for the facts are shrouded in secrecy and closely guarded by dynasties of priests and caretakers. How come a Buddhist girl is worshipped by autocratic Hindu rulers? Are the initiation rituals as macabre as they are rumoured to be? And what fate awaits the Living Goddesses when they attain puberty and are dismissed from their role? Weaving together myth, religious belief, modern history and court gossip, Isabella Tree takes us on a compelling and fascinating journey to the esoteric, hidden heart of Nepal. Through her unprecedented access to the many layers of Nepalese society, she is able to put the country's troubled modern history in the context of the complex spiritual beliefs and practices that inform the role of the little girl at its centre. Deeply felt, emotionally engaged and written after over a decade of travel and research, The Living Goddess is a compassionate and illuminating enquiry into this reclusive Himalayan country -a revelation.
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The Living Goddess
A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF KATHMANDU
ISABELLA TREE
To Living Goddesses, past, present and future
Look upon a woman as a goddess
Whose special energy she is,
And honour her in that state.
Uttara Tantra
Contents
Timeline
PART ONE
Chapter 1
A Living Goddess
A hush descends on the tiny stone courtyard. A footfall, a cough, the beating of a pigeon’s wings resound like a thunderclap in the silence. Outside, the jangling of rickshaw bells and motorbike horns belongs to another world.
Without warning, a child appears at an ornately carved window on the second floor. She could be six, eight or nine years old. It is impossible to tell. She gazes sternly down on the assembled foreigners, pouting slightly, looking mildly inconvenienced. Her eyes are huge, exaggerated with thick lines of kohl reaching all the way to her temples. She is dressed entirely in red, her lips bright red; her hair bound up tightly in a topknot; gold ornaments around her neck and bangles on her wrists. Her tiny fingers, their nails painted red, clasp a wooden rail across the bottom of the window with the command of a captain at the ship’s helm.
There are awed murmurs and even some applause. The child’s expression does not falter. Lowering his voice the guide explains, ‘She does not smile. If she did, it would be an invitation to heaven and you would die.’
Just as suddenly, the child is gone, reabsorbed into the shadows, leaving only a flutter of red curtains.
The little girl is Nepal’s ‘Living Goddess’, one of the sightseeing landmarks of Kathmandu, the face in every guidebook and on every tourist poster. To Nepalis she is known as ‘Kumari’ – the word for a virgin or unmarried girl. She is believed to manifest a powerful Goddess who protects Kathmandu and watches over the country and all its citizens. All-seeing, all-knowing, she is said to have eyes in the past and the future, and to see everything that goes on in the present. She has the power to cure illnesses, to remove obstacles in the way of happiness, to bestow immeasurable blessings on those pure of heart. She is said to punish the wicked with a single withering stare.
I was eighteen the first time I saw her, fresh out of school, travelling with three friends on a gap year in South Asia. For several months in the summer of 1983 we rented a couple of rooms in Freak Street, a fading hippy colony in the heart of old Kathmandu. Our shutters opened on to the southern facade of the old royal palace and, on the other side of Basantpur Square, an imposing three-storey building made of red brick with a deep, clay-tiled roof and wooden lattice windows – the palace of the Living Goddess.
The ‘Kumari Ghar’, or ‘Kumari Chen’ – the Kumari House – was a hive of activity, the entrance around the corner in Durbar Square guarded by a pair of magnificent stone lions. Every day devotees would climb the short flight of steps between the lions and, ducking their heads beneath the ornate wooden doorway, carry plates of offerings inside. Across the little courtyard they entered a door tucked away in a corner marked ‘Hindus ONLY’.
This was as far as we could go, the building itself being strictly closed to foreigners. But devotees themselves can only venture as far as the Kumari’s public puja room upstairs, behind the window where the little goddess occasionally appears for tourists. The rest of the building remains a mystery to them. In particular, we were told, there is one room where no one outside the Living Goddess’s inner circle can go. On the top floor, directly above the main entrance, is an elaborate five-section window looking out on to the pagoda temples of Durbar Square. The central section is bronze-gilt and framed by golden dancing goddesses. It is a window fit for a queen. Only the Living Goddess can look through it. Behind it is her throne room, the most powerful place in the whole building – a ceremonial chamber reserved for rituals conducted by tantric priests and attended by the king.
A certain amount is widely known about the Living Goddess. For most of the time, our neighbours told us, she is restricted to the inside of the Kumari Chen. She leaves the building only to attend festivals, a dozen or so times a year. In order to maintain her purity her feet must never touch the ground, so on most occasions she is carried out of the house in the arms of one of the male members of her household and then borne aloft in a handheld palanquin. For three days in September, during the festival of Indra Jatra, she is pulled around the city on a massive golden chariot.
A special female caretaker and her family are responsible for looking after her and preserving the conditions that allow the Goddess to reside inside her. The Kumari’s own family lives elsewhere. Her parents hand over their daughter to the Kumari Chen when she is selected for the role, around the age of three or four. Though they can go and see her they cannot embrace her or speak to her. They simply touch their foreheads to her feet like other devotees. She will be their daughter again only on the cusp of puberty, when she rejoins the world of mortals and leaves the Kumari Chen for good.
Another stipulation is that the Kumari must not bleed. If she cuts or grazes herself accidentally – if she suffers so much as a scratch – then the spirit of the Goddess inside her will disappear. So special care has to be taken to protect her from injury. When she shows signs of reaching puberty, before she can experience the blood loss of her first menstruation, the Kumari is dismissed and another little girl takes her place.
This much is popular knowledge. But much of what goes on inside the Kumari Chen is highly secret. The Kumari belongs to a belief system based on esoteric tantric rituals. Rumours and speculations are rife, even among Nepalis who worship her. There are stories of dark initiations at the dead of night: a terrifying ordeal in which the little Goddess walks barefoot through bloody courtyards scattered with the severed heads of goats and buffaloes while men dressed as demons leap and howl in the shadows. She is said to spend the night alone, shut up in a room with ghosts and rats. If the child shows no fear, our neighbours explained, it proves the Goddess has accepted her.
How the Kumari is selected is also a mystery. Some say it is a mystical process, the work of astrologers and tantric priests – like the selection of Tibet’s Dalai Lama. Some say she is stripped naked and subjected to an intimate physical examination. There are certain signs the priests are said to look for. She has to be exceptionally beautiful, with radiant ‘golden’ skin, no blemishes, birthmarks or scars, and no indications of smallpox that, until recently, blighted the complexions of so many children in Nepal. She is said to be blessed with thirty-two lakshina – the physical perfections of a bodhisattva. She has to have the chest of a lion, for example; a neck like a conch shell; eyelashes like a cow; body like a banyan tree; the thighs of a deer; small and well-recessed sexual organs; a voice clear and soft like a duck’s. Sometimes, mothers are said to dream of the Goddess when they are pregnant – a sure sign they are bearing a Kumari. Sometimes a snake – generally considered a good omen in Nepal – enters the house shortly after a future Kumari is born.
The child Goddess exhibits almost superhuman patience and poise. She is often required to sit motionless on a simple throne or cushion for hours at a time. Even when she is carried outside in her palanquin her demeanour remains sublimely calm, at odds with the thronging, excitable crowds around her. To westerners familiar with demanding toddlers her placidity is inexplicable. At Indra Jatra, her chariot processions last the best part of a day, during which time she does not touch a morsel of food or a drop of water, or absent herself to go to the lavatory. It was rumoured in the shady cafés of Freak Street that the caretakers use hypnosis, or strong alcohol or drugs – the only way, our hippy neighbours claimed, a toddler can ever possibly be this compliant. One old dharma bum was convinced, not without envy, that the Kumari is given soma – the legendary narcotic mentioned in the Rig Veda.
What happens to a Kumari after her dismissal is also a matter of conjecture. Former Living Goddesses are said to be extremely dangerous and capable of wreaking bloody accidents wherever they go. No one would ever want to marry an ex-Kumari, Nepalis told us. Snakes slither out of her vagina, threatening to emasculate any man foolish enough to try to deflower her. Some, on the other hand, insisted that sex is the only way these degraded goddesses can earn a living and claimed that ex-Kumaris are trafficked, along with thousands of other girls from Nepal, to brothels in Mumbai or Bangkok.
As we settled into life in Durbar Square the enigma of our neighbour became all-engrossing. We dropped in on her courtyard almost every day. Often she would grace us with an appearance at her window but some days we would wander away disappointed. At night we would catch a glimpse of a little figure in red flashing past the windows of her house. Her presence, like an occlusion in the mind’s eye, trailed us on our excursions around the valley. We began to see the name ‘Kumari’ everywhere we went – on signs for shops, banks, travel agents, as the brand name of beauty products. On quiet afternoons in our flat I would write about her in my journal, wondering where she came from, what life was like for her inside the Kumari Chen, whether she was happy, where she would go when she was dismissed, if there was any truth to the darkest of the rumours.
I realized my framework for understanding what she represented was very limited. I found myself likening her to a ‘Christ-child – innocent, vulnerable’. ‘Perhaps,’ I scribbled in my notebook, she stood for ‘some kind of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of the world’. Or, being virginal, she was a version of the Madonna – ‘meek and submissive’, ‘without sin’, ‘untainted by adult desires’. But deep down, I knew my theorizings were wide of the mark. The Kumari’s expression as she gazed down on us from her window – defiant, sultry, provocative – kept pulling me up. It warned me not to take anything about her for granted.
I was particularly intrigued by the notion of her power. I lived in a world where the omnipotent deity, if one still believed in his existence, was incontrovertibly male. The idea of a supreme female being was inconceivable. Yet to Nepalis the Goddess residing in this little child was regarded as sovereign, pivotal to the very existence of their kingdom. Every year, at the festival of Indra Jatra, the king of Nepal would come to the Kumari’s house, kneel at the feet of the Living Goddess and beg her blessing to rule. If the Kumari was happy with him, she would dip her fingers in a dish of vermilion by her side and place a red tika on his forehead. If the king did not receive this blessing, his reign was doomed. The Kumari’s displeasure, people said, might even signify his death.
The tradition requiring the king of Nepal to submit himself to the divine will of a female child originated in the time of the Mallas – the Hindu kings who had ruled the Kathmandu Valley before the present Shah dynasty. The Mallas were names still on everyone’s lips. Their influence was everywhere in the valley, but their showmanship was concentrated in the spectacular buildings they had created around their durbars and the votive pillars they had erected in front of certain temples with golden statues of themselves on top, kneeling in prayer.
The Mallas had originally fled to the Himalaya to escape the Turkish invasions of India, eventually coming to power in the Kathmandu Valley around 1200 CE. Their provenance is illustrious. They are mentioned in the Mahabharata and in early Buddhist texts. As with all Hindu kings, their subjects had considered them to be divine. Once established in the ‘Valley of Nepal’ they ushered in an era – lasting over five and a half centuries – of extraordinary prosperity and by the fifteenth century had established three separate dynasties in the valley ruling from three kingdoms centred on the cities of Bhaktapur, Kathmandu and Patan. Like the city states of ancient Greece each Malla kingdom was independent yet intimately connected to the others, bound together by an endless cycle of kinship and enmity, alliances and competition. At its height, under their auspices, the wealth of the Kathmandu Valley reached mythical proportions. Rumours of a lost Shangri-La, abounding in rivers of gold and untold treasure, tantalized the outside world as the Malla kings embellished their palaces and temples with golden doors, gigantic bronze gongs and bells, copper roofs and golden roof-finials.
The Mallas had derived their wealth from two vital trade routes traversing the valley: one running south–north from India to Tibet and, beyond, to China; the other east–west from Bhutan and Sikkim to Mustang and Kashmir. The city of Kathmandu lay at the centre of this lucrative crossroads. Sitting high on the steps of the pagoda temples, watching the world go by, the magnetism of this spot continues to be overwhelming. The same criss-crossing traffic passes by the old royal palace, skirting the temple plinths and the ancient pilgrims’ rest house of Kasthamandap (the building that gave Kathmandu its name) as it has for over a millennium. Coin dealers and money changers vie for passing trade as dark-skinned hawkers from the Terai wheeling bicycles loaded with apples and oranges intersect the passage of Sherpas from the hills staggering full tilt, heads bowed under some monstrous load like an oven or fridge. In the tight alleyways around Durbar Square, alongside shops selling motorbike parts and pirated cassette tapes, merchants deal in the same commodities that have filled their coffers for centuries – silk, musk, salt, wool, red coral, turquoise, lapis, silver, gold, rubies, yaks’ tails, spices, sandalwood, vermilion, cotton, tea.
But locals have another way of explaining the centripetal pull of Kathmandu’s ancient centre. According to legend the city had been founded in Satya Yuga, the Golden Age, by Manjushri – a great bodhisattva, or enlightened being – in the shape of his sword. Manjushri was the central figure in the Buddhist creation myth of the valley. The crux of his sword marks the crossroads that is now the heart of the city. It is a sacred place, a magical apex that generates prosperity for the kingdom and bestows blessings on everyone who passes through it.
In Kathmandu, we discovered, all the stories of the past are suffused with myth, and legends run circles around historical facts. To Nepalis this is natural, as if facts alone cannot reveal all the hidden meanings and deeper relevances. Myths are living things, stories to live by. As familiar as close friends, they permeate dreams and waking thoughts, evoking comparisons. Reminiscences and coincidences tumble about, instructive reminders that the present dances hypnotically to the rhythms of the past.
Nowhere are the boundaries between myth and reality more blurred than around the origins of the Living Goddess. The most popular story attributes the last Malla king of Kathmandu with establishing the first Kumari. Jaya Prakasha Malla, a king reigning in the first half of the eighteenth century, had instituted the practice of worshipping a living child after falling foul of a goddess with whom he used to spend afternoons playing dice. Though little more than two centuries ago, this was in the days when gods and goddesses still frequented the valley, consorting with mortals. But he did not worship her for long. In the middle of the eighteenth century an ambitious Hindu raja from the small hill kingdom of Gorkha, some eighty miles to the west of Kathmandu, set his sights on conquering the valley. In a campaign that lasted twenty-five years, Prithvi Narayan Shah – ancestor of the modern royal dynasty of Nepal – began attacking the Malla forts on the valley rim, capturing them one by one, cutting off the valley’s vital trade routes, and slowly starving the population into submission. His aim was to bring the Malla kings to their knees – a goal he ultimately achieved with the Living Goddess’s blessing.
Everyone in Nepal knows the story of how the Gorkha conqueror and his troops stole into Kathmandu at night during the festival of Indra Jatra while the population of the city was riotously drunk and Jaya Prakasha Malla was accompanying the Living Goddess on her procession in her temple chariot around the city streets. In the mayhem that followed, the Malla king was separated from the Kumari and forced to flee. The Kumari returned to Durbar Square in her chariot, took up her throne on the dais outside the Kumari Chen and, seamlessly, Prithvi Narayan Shah stepped up and knelt at her feet. In front of the astounded crowds the Living Goddess planted her tika on the forehead of the Gorkha conqueror.
From all we heard about this story and its enduring power in the community around Durbar Square it was clear that to Nepalis the fortunes of the Shah dynasty, sealed on that fateful night in 1768, depended on the reigning monarch’s continued devotion to the Living Goddess. More than two centuries on, Prithvi Narayan Shah’s descendant still came to the Kumari Chen every year, climbing the stairs to the Kumari’s throne room behind the golden window, seeking her blessing, securing his rule over the kingdom. As teenagers we had hoped, in vain, to catch a glimpse of him. King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah, the only remaining Hindu king in the world, crowned in 1975, was, like his predecessors, considered to be a god – an avatar of Vishnu, the great preserver. Seeing him, we were told, would wash away any sins committed that day.
The old royal palace of Hanuman Dhoka threw its shadow over our little flat. Its presence was a brooding legacy of palace intrigues and royal coups. A tangled knot of medieval towers, dark passages, long low-ceilinged halls and hidden courtyards, it had been vacated by the royal family at the turn of the twentieth century when they moved to a modern mansion, the Narayanhiti Palace, where they still lived. But the influence of Hanuman Dhoka remained. This was where the kings of Nepal came to be crowned and where the sword representing their power was kept. King Birendra was said to come at the dead of night, sometimes, to perform secret pujas at shrines in the palace’s courtyards. And in moments of uncertainty or danger, his priests would send offerings to the Kumari Chen, or the king might come himself to supplicate the Living Goddess.
I found this idea, that the existence of the king of Nepal still depended on the performance of a child, compelling, and even more, the fact – not acknowledged in the guidebooks or other western accounts – that the little girl with the power to grant or withhold her blessing from the Hindu king was a Buddhist. The ‘Hindus ONLY’ sign by the door in the courtyard of the Kumari Chen was, in essence, misleading. Nepali Buddhists also come regularly to worship the Kumari. Her caretakers are Buddhist, and a royal Buddhist priest comes every morning to perform his worship at the Buddhist shrines in the Kumari Chen while the royal Hindu priest performs parallel pujas to the Kumari in her throne room.
The blending of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the religious tolerance it demonstrates, was, to me, one of the most beguiling aspects of Nepal. It had been fostered by an extraordinary coincidence of geography and climate. For millennia, this small, fertile basin in the steep southern ridges of the Himalayan foothills had been accessible only by footpaths winding through the mountains. Pilgrims and traders journeying to the sacred sites and lucrative markets of the fabled ‘Valley of Nepal’ had to brave high passes and swaying rope bridges over vertiginous chasms the mere sight of which caused one tenth-century lama travelling from Tibet to ‘tremble more than quicksilver’.
On reaching the valley visitors were compelled to stay for months, waiting for the change in seasons. For nearly six months of the year, during the summer monsoon, the valley was cut off from the Indian plains to the south because of the swollen rivers and the malaria-ridden jungles of the lowland Terai; during the winter, the northern passes were closed by snow. This enforced mingling of travellers from different cultures created a society that was extraordinarily tolerant, open-minded and self-confident – one that promoted the valley as a repository of artistic and religious ideas, and an important destination for great teachers, artists and gurus of every persuasion.
Early on, Shiva had become the dominant Hindu deity of the valley, his temple by the burning ghats of Pashupati on the Bagmati – where the kings of Nepal were cremated – an important pilgrimage site, and most of the valley’s first rulers were, ostensibly at least, Shaivas – followers of Shiva.
Buddhism had also made an early entrance, the Buddha himself having been born in Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal. The great Indian emperor Ashoka, or at least his daughter, was thought to have journeyed to the Kathmandu Valley in the fifth century BCE, founding some of the earliest Buddhist stupas in the subcontinent.
In the melting pot of the Kathmandu Valley these two strands of belief grew so entwined as to be profoundly confusing to outsiders. While Nepalis might describe themselves as Shivamargi (Hindus, or ‘followers of the path of Shiva’) or Buddhamargi (followers of the Buddhist path), in practice there is often little distinction. The two faiths borrow practices and ideas from each other, worship each other’s deities, only with different names, and lend each other priests. The Living Goddess, worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists, and served by both a Hindu and a Buddhist priest, seemed to me the ultimate expression of this unique blend of religious cooperation.
Nepal’s remoteness not only created a nursery for religious ideas and practices, it also safeguarded it from the great empires flexing their muscles on its doorstep. There was no whiff of colonialism here, a feature that made Kathmandu all the more appealing in my eyes. The Muslim invasions that transformed the Indian subcontinent failed – apart from one singularly destructive raid in the fourteenth century – to make inroads this far. Similarly, for Chinese imperialist ambitions, Nepal, on the other side of the inhospitable plateau of Tibet, was an impossible goal. Even the British East India Company in the eighteenth century, headquartered 350 miles away in the Bay of Bengal, was forced, after several attempts, to accept the futility of taking over the prosperous little ‘Kingdom of Nepaul’.
The valley remained true to its inherent nature, its culture both insular and traditional, yet also malleable and open-minded. Over the centuries it became the natural refuge for non-conformist spiritual practices and philosophies, especially those antithetical to the rising mainstream religions of brahmanical Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.
The valley threw a lifeline to Buddhism as, under pressure from Muslim conquest, it entered its death throes in India. Buddhist monks, scholars and tantric priests with artefacts and sacred texts secreted in their robes fled up the mountain paths to Nepal following the destruction of the great Buddhist monasteries and the scholastic university of Nalanda in the twelfth century. To Buddhists the valley became known as ‘punya bhumi’ – the sacred land.
The branch of Buddhism that ultimately prevailed in Nepal was Mahayana and it was to this school of Buddhism that the children chosen to be Living Goddesses belonged. To me, as a teenager, with only the vaguest notions of Buddhism, Mahayana was a revelation. Instead of the purist focus on a single Buddha, Nepali Buddhists worship a bewildering proliferation of gods and goddesses, yakshas, yoginis and flying dakinis. There are even additional historical Buddhas who, according to Mahayana, lived prior to the fourth-century BCE Buddha Shakyamuni, as well as Buddhas who are destined to come in the future, and five Transcendent Buddhas, or ‘Jinas’, residing in other dimensions.
Mahayana evolved around the beginning of the Common Era in a famous split from the Theravada doctrine of conservative monasticism propounded by Buddha’s disciples. Unlike Theravada, established in countries like Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Thailand, Mahayana – the ‘Great Way’ – threw its doors open to everyone. Instead of focusing on personal salvation in isolated monasteries, relying on the charity of others, Mahayana Buddhists focus on a more altruistic goal – the liberation of all sentient beings – and choose to remain in the swim of life where they can help everyone. In Nepal, as in Tibet, Buddhists worship gods and goddesses as celestial ‘bodhisattvas’ – meritorious beings destined to achieve enlightenment who have delayed their attainment of Buddhahood in order to assist others along the same path.
But it was not only Buddhism that flourished in the sanctuary of the valley. Boosted by the Himalayan practices of animism and spirit possession, cults of goddess worship and Shaktism (worship of the supreme feminine principle) found refuge here as the patriarchal religions engulfed the subcontinent. The Living Goddess is a reflection of these older influences, too, and her roots lie deep in the misty origins of the valley itself, in the story of Nepal’s beginnings.
Chapter 2
The Jewel of Beginnings
In the morning of time, in the golden age of Satya Yuga, when the mountains and plains and forests of the world were newborn, there was a lake – the most beautiful lake the world would ever know. It sparkled like liquid gold. Into it poured the clearest streams from the glaciers of the surrounding Himalaya. Its surface mirrored the sky. Every day as the sun rose and set it blushed the colour of roseate coral. At midday it turned the thundering blue of lapis lazuli. And at night the stars set themselves in the surface like glittering diamonds. The lake was at one with the heavens, a vessel of wealth and tranquillity upon the earth.
There were many strange and beautiful spirits in the lake, and their watery domain was governed by the snake gods known as Nagas. Crowned with precious jewels in their heads, the Nagas guarded the fabulous riches of the lake. Foremost among the Nagas were King Karkotak and his beautiful queen. The lake became known as Nagahrada – Lake of the Nagas.
As the aeons passed, the lake also drew to its shores siddhas, accomplished sages, who would meditate upon the waters from the surrounding hilltops. The first such sage to arrive at the lake was Vipashvin, the first of the seven historical Buddhas – the first human being to attain enlightenment.
As Vipashvin sat high atop Nagarjun Mountain, with eyes half-closed, hands resting lightly on his thighs, contemplating the sacred nature of the water before him, a lotus seed miraculously appeared and hung suspended in the air before him. Softly, like a moth, Vipashvin spread his right hand so that the seed might drift down on to his palm.
Then in his wisdom, Vipashvin knew what he must do. He closed the seed in his fist and raised himself to his feet and circumambulated the lake three times; and he threw the lotus seed high into the air so that it spun in a rainbow arc out into the middle of the water where it landed with an almost imperceptible splash. He recited charms over it, and a wondrous prediction came to him, and he began to chant: ‘When this lotus shall flower, the primordial Buddha, Swayambhu, the Self-Existent One, shall be revealed as a flame.’ And in his mindfulness he also predicted that in a forthcoming era a great bodhisattva called Manjushri – ‘He of Great Majesty’ – would come from China and he would drain the water in the lake, thereby leaving a fertile valley fit for human habitation.
And so, over the years, the seed drifted down into the silt at the bottom of the lake and in the era of the second historical Buddha, Shikhin, it began to germinate. The lotus seed had taken root at the site of an eternal spring, source of the Goddess herself, hidden deep in the earth. It was the secret opening, the womb, from which all life began, a hidden source of the Goddess known as Guhyeshvari – ‘Mistress of the Secret’.
Drawing thus upon the source of all things, the lotus sent its stem steadily upwards from the pitha, the seat, of Guhyeshvari through the murky depths to the clear waters above where, reaching the air and sunlight at last, it burst into a flower as large as the wheel of a chariot. The flower was wondrous to behold. It had ten thousand petals with diamonds sparkling on their upper sides, pearls shimmering beneath them, and rubies gleaming in their centres. The pollen of the flower was golden, the seed lobes were emerald, and the stamens, lapis lazuli. From the centre of the flower radiated a gigantic flame one cubit high and of such brilliance it transformed all those who saw it. The flame itself was the Adi Buddha ‘Swayambhu’ Jyotirupa – the Primordial Buddha Self-Originated Light-Form – and its light consisted of rays of five colours, white, blue, yellow, red and green, which were the essence of the five Transcendent Buddhas who personify the five knowledges of a fully enlightened being.
In time, the third Buddha, Vishvabhu, came with his disciples to pay homage to the sacred flame of Swayambhu in the great lake of serpents, and he stood on Mount Phulchok to take darshan of the primordial light, and offered his puja in the form of a hundred thousand flowers. And in the presence of his disciples he confirmed that the time had almost come when the great bodhisattva, sweet-voiced Manjushri, would come.
Indeed, at the very same time, in faraway China, on the five-peaked mountain of Wu-tai Shan, the bodhisattva, sweet-voiced Manjushri, entered into a deep meditation and became aware of the existence of the primordial Adi Buddha in the form of a flame on the other side of the Himalaya in the lake known as ‘The Abode of Serpents’. So he took upon himself human form and left China to take darshan of this place, carrying in his left hand the book of wisdom and in his right a shining sword called Chandrahas (Moon Derider).
As soon as the bodhisattva came upon the great lake of serpents he circled it three times leaving soft indentations with his feet in the surface of the water. Then he made a circuit of the holy mountains around the lake. Taking each peak in one stride, his silken robes fluttering like prayer flags, he went first to Mount Nagarjun; and then to the peak of Mount Phulchok; and then he strode on to Mount Champadevi; and finally, alighting on the peak of Sengu which rose like an island in the middle of the lake, he paid homage to the sacred flame of Swayambhu.
And as Manjushri gazed upon the lake stretching in all directions around him, it occurred to him that the primordial flame could be venerated more easily by men if the lake was drained. So he decided to expose the flame of Swayambhu and all the sacred locations that were still underwater and entered into a deep meditation on how best to do this. And when he had seen how he could do it, he summoned all his strength and with a mighty roar raised his shining sword above his head and brought it down upon Kotval Mountain, cleaving it in two. Then he slashed further clefts at Chobar, Gokarna and Aryaghat and the water began gushing out, crashing in silvery cascades towards India.
The Nagas, great snake kings, realizing that their precious home was being destroyed, came to Manjushri in despair. Manjushri told them he wished them no harm and was sorry that, for the greater good of men and all sentient beings, it had been necessary for him to drain the lake, and he implored the Nagas not to leave the valley but to take up residence in a special pond he would create for them instead; and he assured them that here they would receive worship from humankind henceforth and forever. For Manjushri knew that the Nagas were very auspicious beings who knew the secrets of rain and wealth and many other things that would be of great assistance to the future inhabitants of this land.
The Nagas acquiesced and slithered into their new home in Taudah pond. Here great Karkotak, king of the Nagas, constructed a magnificent underwater durbar, and Karkotak’s queen sat on a throne studded with jewels, shaded with three umbrellas of white diamonds one above the other. And though, in years to come, men tried to drain this pond in order to find this durbar and steal its treasures, none has ever succeeded. The pond of Taudah is where Karkotak and his beautiful queen dwell to this day.
When, at last, the great lake had disappeared, Manjushri received darshan of the Swayambhu Adi Buddha on the full moon of the month of Karttika and for the first time the mysterious root-source of the thousand-petalled lotus that had once lain at the bottom of the lake became visible. The site was wondrous to behold. The lotus seed, with its three corners deep inside the earth, had lodged around a deep, dark opening in the shape of a triangle, like the entrance of the female sex. The site reeked of liquor and foamed with the froth of flowers and incense. This was the yoni of Guhyeshvari, the Goddess’s lower mouth, her sex, the essence of her being.
But now a whirlpool was beginning to rise at this spot and, fearing that it might once again fill the entire valley with water, Manjushri took in one hand a mighty diamond thunderbolt called a vajra and began to meditate deeply on what he had seen. He visualized the luminous form of the Goddess, seeing it in the form of water, visible everywhere, and as he achieved this visualization, he rejoiced and worshipped it with deepest reverence and thus restrained the upsurging torrent.
So pleased was the Goddess with Manjushri’s devotion and his recognition of her hidden source that she gave darshan to him in her universal form. First, she revealed herself to him in peaceful aspect, as a young girl, sixteen years of age, with round breasts and firm thighs, naked but for her beauteous adornments, dancing with her face towards the north. On her head she bore a magnificent crown of the Five Buddhas; her earrings were the sun and the moon. She had three eyes, lovely as lotus petals; and she played entrancingly with a cleaver and a skull-cup in her hands. As she danced, her girdle of bone and the garland of human heads around her neck swung hypnotically to the rhythm of her body.
Then, as Manjushri gazed in wonderment, the apparition of the Goddess began to change. Flowers rained down from the sky, tremors shook the earth, and the Goddess transformed herself into her wrathful form. Her eyes became the sun and moon; her third eye, aeon-ending fire. Intoxicated with the five forbidden nectars and dressed in a tiger’s pelt with garlands like lightning flashes, the Goddess began to dance. Blasts of heat and searing cold began to emanate from her body. Suddenly she had a thousand faces. Two thousand arms fanned out from her sides, each wielding a weapon or instrument of destruction more fearsome than the next. The constellations orbited in her hair; her earrings were wailing ghosts. As she danced, surrounded by a whirling chorus of skeleton devotees, waves of vibrations rippled through the universe. Fearlessly she trampled upon the mighty forms of the great gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, beating them to her will with the pounding of her feet.
When, in the midst of this terrifying performance, the Goddess spoke, her voice bayed like the howling of a hundred jackals sending shivers through the viscera of Manjushri’s being. Roaring like thunderclouds and gnashing her teeth, with her eyes bulging and her black tongue projecting horrifyingly from her mouth, the Goddess began to impart her secrets to Manjushri. And Manjushri observed her, as calmly as he could, opening his heart and receiving the awesome knowledge into his soul with perfect stillness.
After displaying her single-faced form followed by the thousand faces of her most terrifying aspects, the Goddess transformed herself into water and disappeared back inside her pitha. This was on the ninth day of the waning half of the month of Marga.
On the next day, the tenth of the lunar calendar, Manjushri prepared a suitable conduit for the Goddess’s emissions. He covered the opening with a triangular stone slab. In the centre of the stone was a hole through which the water could safely issue forth.
Then Manjushri took his principal disciple, a great yogin called Shantikar Acharya, to a deep cave on Sengu hill and initiated him into the esoteric teachings of the Vairochana and Akshobya cycles and the Chakrasamvara Tantras, just as they had been revealed to him by the Goddess. And so Shantikar Acharya became the valley’s first vajra-master, or Vajracharya priest. And in time, Shantikar Acharya passed on this knowledge to others who, in utmost secrecy and after rigorous training, also became Vajracharya masters, living among the people and using their powers to invoke the deities for the benefit of all sentient beings.
So now the lotus of Swayambhu was exposed on a hillock where all could come and worship it; and around the hillock, where once there had been water, lay a great valley of rich and fertile land. And soon the valley filled with Manjushri’s disciples, and he designed a glorious city for them in the shape of his sword. He sited this city in a most auspicious place, at the confluence of the Bagmati and Vishnumati, rivers fed by the waters that issued from deep inside Guhyeshvari pitha.
He called the city Manju (sweet) Pattana (city) and enthroned one of his devotees, Dharmankara, as king. And he taught the people who inhabited the city the fundamentals of civilization and culture, and of farming and husbandry, and also the art of ritual including the Ten Rites of Passage, and devotion to the five Transcendent Buddhas, the Three Jewels and the Ten Perfections, as well as worship of the seven historical Buddhas, and all the attendant bodhisattvas and other gods, and the Astamatrika – the eight mother goddesses, protectoresses of the eight directions. And for those citizens whose dharma it was to live as monks or priests he created monasteries and temples.
He also taught the people of Manjupattana how to venerate the tree spirits in the mighty forests at the edge of the valley, so that they might cut down the trees with impunity; and he showed them how to carve the wood and give it new life. He taught them how to mould and bake the red clay that had once lain at the bottom of the lake so that even the humble house-brick would be blessed and become strong as iron. They learnt how to make roof tiles like the scales of a Naga, with dragon’s heads at the roof corners, and to imprint the clay with flowing waves and mythical beasts for cornices in memory of this watery pre-existence; and in no time their craftsmanship was sought after across all the other kingdoms of the Himalaya, and far, far beyond.
For their own city, they built beautiful, many-tiered pagodas, with dancing deities carved on the roof struts and monasteries with latticed peacock windows, and Buddhas and bodhisattvas in elaborate wooden shields called toranas above the doors. Soon they were carving devotional plaques and friezes and reliefs and guardian lions from stone.
But most magnificent of all was the work they fashioned from gold and silver and bronze. For Manjushri taught the people the magical secrets of metallurgy, and from crucibles of molten fire they began to pour and cast images of the gods that were so beautiful they could move the heavens. And the work of these divinely inspired bronze- and gold-smiths would become much sought-after throughout the world.
After he had taught the inhabitants of Manjupattana all these wondrous things, Manjushri made ready to return to his abode on the five-peaked mountain of Wu-tai Shan in China. But before he left, he enshrined an aspect of himself in an image on the western peak of the hillock of Swayambhu from where he rains down countless blessings upon the inhabitants of the valley to this day.
So pleased were they with all this work of devotion established in the valley by sweet-voiced Manjushri that from time to time the gods and goddesses themselves would descend from their residences in the Abode of Snows to dwell among the people of Manjupattana and their kings, delighting in the earthly pleasures of the beautiful settlements there and vying for the attention of their illustrious devotees. And in time, Manjupattana came to be known as Kathmandu; the valley, Nepal; and its inhabitants, the Newars.
Chapter 3
The Newars
I left Kathmandu at the end of that summer in 1983 with regret, feeling as though something had slipped through my fingers. Back at home, life took over and the Living Goddess became a retreating memory, the questions about her receding to the back of my mind.
Fourteen years later, however, in 1997, an opportunity presented itself that catapulted the Kumari back into the forefront. A friend, recently married to a colonel in the British Gurkhas, had just moved out to Kathmandu and invited me to stay. She suggested coming in October, in time for Dasain, the biggest festival in the Nepali calendar. The traditional marker for the end of monsoon and the opening of the season for military campaigns, Dasain is celebrated with particular gusto by the Nepali army. It is also one of the most important festivals for the Living Goddess. It is the occasion on which a new Kumari – if one is called for – is installed. It is also the moment when, every year, the reigning Kumari is rumoured to be subjected to terrifying initiation rituals among severed buffalo heads in a courtyard in the old royal palace.
Laxminath Shrestha welcomed me into his house in an affluent suburb of Kathmandu and showed me to a bright, modern sitting room. At first I could see nothing about him to distinguish him from any other well-to-do Nepali. He made his living teaching Nepali to expats, including the friend I was staying with, and, in his smart blazer and buckled brown shoes, comfortably at home with foreigners, he clearly considered himself a man of the world. As we began to talk, though, something seemed to stir inside him. There was a sense that, away from the coffee table strewn with grammar textbooks, Laxminath’s allegiances lay elsewhere, deep in the recesses of old Nepal.
Dasain is a festival of reunions and new beginnings, when the Nepali diaspora comes home from abroad and foreigners descend on the capital to witness the festival, and to Laxminath this was a natural time for me to be returning to Kathmandu. But he also assumed a stronger pull. In Laxminath’s eyes, my standing in the Kumari’s courtyard, seeing the Kumari fourteen years earlier, had ignited a connection with the Goddess. He referred to it as darshan – ‘seeing’ – a term loaded with meaning for both Hindus and Buddhists.
The notion of vision, of eye contact, as an opening to the divine is evident in every aspect of life in Kathmandu. There are eyes painted on the tailgates of trucks, on rickshaws and buses, on the wheels of bicycles, and on the great solid wooden wheels of the Living Goddess’s golden chariot. These are watchful eyes, the oversight of protective deities saving passengers from accidents. Then there are eyes indicating sacred space – at the entrances to temples and monastic courtyards, and on either side of the narrow entrance to the old royal palace, where the monkey god Hanuman guards the gate, or dhoka. Inside Hanuman Dhoka itself, in Nasal Chowk, the palace’s central courtyard, great wooden eyes with wooden eyelashes and eyebrows guard doors leading off into inner chambers.
For visitors to Nepal the most characteristic of all are the great sloping eyes on the harmikas of the Buddhist stupas at Swayambhu and Boudha – the eyes that are reproduced everywhere on tourist T-shirts and posters. Half-closed, as if in a meditative trance, these gigantic eyes gaze out across the valley through the veils of the beyond.
In sacred paintings – of the kind sold in artists’ shops around Durbar Square and in the tourist enclave of Thamel – the eyes of deities are invariably huge. Some, like the Buddhist goddess Saptolochana, have eyes in the palms of their hands and feet. The god Indra, king of Heaven, has a thousand eyes over all his body. The intention is to draw the mind of the beholder into the paintings through visual contact, energetically connecting them with the deities themselves.
Nowhere is this notion of spiritual vision more powerful than in the third ‘fire eye’ located in the sacred spot in the centre of the forehead of some of the more ferocious deities. All-seeing, all-knowing, all-encompassing, the fire eye can either radiate bliss or reduce the object of its gaze to a heap of smouldering ashes. The Living Goddess herself has a fire eye, or drishti – a golden eye with a black pupil that she wears on special occasions like Indra Jatra or Dasain when she is at her most powerful. To have darshan of the Kumari when she is wearing her third eye is, Nepalis believe, to receive the most powerful connection with the Goddess.
But just catching a glimpse of the Living Goddess at her window on a normal, non-festival day, as tourists do, can have lasting repercussions, Laxminath said; it can open channels of communication with the deity even if you have no inkling of it at the time.
Laxminath swept aside the grammar books on the coffee table as his wife, Belayati, brought in Nepali tea and we began to talk about the days ahead. He had agreed to guide me through the climax of Dasain, and in particular the great ninth day, or Navami – a day of animal sacrifices. The reason I had solicited Laxminath’s help for this was that he was, specifically, a Newar.
The significance of the Newars had eluded me on my last visit, as it often does first-time visitors to Kathmandu. This is partly because, physically at least, it is often difficult to distinguish Newars from other Nepalis. Some ethnic groups are more obvious – like the Thakalis, Tamangs and Sherpas from the hills; the Rais and Limbus from eastern Nepal; the Gurungs and Magars, Tibeto-Burmese peoples from the central midlands to the west; or the dark-skinned Tharus from the southerly Terai. Newars, on the other hand, embrace a range of different ethnic origins from both Mongoloid and Caucasian roots; and the wide spectrum of Newar castes are often characterized by different physical characteristics, with levels of education and prosperity varying enormously between them.
Newars, though, are central to the culture that developed over centuries in the Kathmandu Valley, and they are key to understanding the Living Goddess. The belief system to which the Kumari belongs is Newar – as is the Kumari herself.
For centuries Newars have been the majority in the Kathmandu Valley but the ratio has been declining steeply over the past three decades owing to burgeoning immigration. Now, less than 30 per cent of the total valley population of 2,600,000 are Newars, with around 650,000 Newars living elsewhere in the country.
It is at the cultural and historical levels that the most important distinctions exist between Newars and the other inhabitants of the valley. The difference is particularly significant between Newars and the Indo-Nepalese, or ‘Parbatiya’ – with whom Newars often feel a particular cultural, political and commercial rivalry.
Parbatiya is the collective name for Bahuns (the Brahmin priest caste) and Chettris (the Kshatriya warrior caste) – the ethnic group that makes up 30 per cent of Nepal’s population. The Parbatiya are exclusively Hindu and associated with orthodox Hindu Brahmins and the military aristocracies of the Indian Rajputs. Preoccupied with military chivalry and Hindu concepts of purity, these warlike rajas had, by the sixteenth century, carved out for themselves numerous petty hill states around the Kathmandu Valley. Parbatiya itself means ‘hill-people’. It was from one of these small Parbatiya hill states that the conqueror Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of the present dynasty of Nepali kings and the unifier of Nepal, had come.
Newars, on the other hand, are not natural warriors. Principally artisans, farmers and merchants by profession, Newars consider themselves the true custodians of what it is to be Nepali. They are the original inhabitants of the ‘Valley of Nepal’ – or believe themselves to be. They are thought to be descended from the Kirata, a Himalayan people referred to in great Indian epics like the Mahabharata and the sacred texts of the Puranas. Over time, waves of immigrants descending on the Kathmandu Valley had added to their genetic mix. The Newars had absorbed these new influences while strongly adhering to their own traditions.
Newars are bound together by a strong sense of community focused on the old city centres and towns in the valley. While most of the modern commercial areas of Kathmandu have been colonized by Indian and non-Newar traders, the original courtyards around Durbar Square are still principally inhabited by Newars, descendants of communities who have lived there for centuries. Newar daily life is defined by ritual and every day, somewhere in the valley, a Newar festival is going on, often several at once. They also observe elaborate life-cycle rituals for both sexes marking the important stages of life from birth to death, known as the Dasa Karma Vidhi (Samskara in Sanskrit), or Ten Rites of Passage.
Originally, it seems, Newars were predominantly Buddhist. But over time and with increasing Hindu influence in the valley, the balance shifted, and at some point, probably around the fourteenth century, Newars adopted the Hindu caste system. Now, half of all Newars claim to be practising Buddhists, and half are Hindu. Many Newars, however, especially those of the middle and lower castes, practise aspects of both religious paths. A popular joke, Laxminath said, is that a Newar is 60 per cent Hindu and 60 per cent Buddhist.
There have been moments in valley history of friction between Buddhists and Hindus – flare-ups over land rights, money or precedence in some ritual performance – but these tended to be localized disputes of the kind that inevitably arise in close-knit communities. The sort of entrenched and radical opposition such as exists between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, or that came to exist between Hinduism and Islam in India, is anathema to the Newar way of thinking. Coexistence and assimilation have always been the Newar ethos, and harmony and balance, empathy and compassion remain goals every good Newar should strive for.
When the Malla kings arrived in the valley they were soon seduced by the culture of the Newars and adopted, or imitated, many of their rituals and practices. They employed Newar architects to build palaces and temples, and, fuelled by their intense rivalry with each other, commissioned works of art from Newar sculptors, painters, carpenters and bronze-casters. Under the influence of the Newars, the Hindu Mallas became far less orthodox in their outlook, subscribing to their melange of localized Buddhist and Hindu practices – some kings venturing so far down the Buddhist path, wearing Buddhist insignia and ornaments, and reading Buddhist texts, that outsiders often mistakenly considered them to be Buddhist.
The turning point came in the eighteenth century when the Kathmandu Valley was conquered by Prithvi Narayan Shah, the Parbatiya king of Gorkha. The Gorkha conquest of the valley tipped the scales in favour of brahmanical Hinduism as the religion of authority in Nepal. The trend towards what Newars considered the ‘Indianization’ of the valley had begun.
Nowhere is this process of cultural tension more clearly felt than in the battle for language. Newari – a Tibeto-Burman language – had originally been the language of the valley, and was adopted by the Malla kings. It is known as Nepal bhasha – ‘the language of Nepal’. Parbatiya, on the other hand, speak Nepali – formerly known as Gorkhali – which is Indo-Aryan in origin and closely related to Sanskrit and its offshoot Hindi. Following Prithvi Narayan Shah’s
