Preliminaries: Priests and Kings—The Relations of the Symbolic Order and Power

Bhaktapur—with its hallucinatory memories of its Newar king, its persisting Ksatriya-like^[*] social segments, its continuing relation to the "new" centralized Saha royal dynasty, its elaborate collection of priests and quasi-priests, and of the other "nonpriestly" traditional social role players who may be contrasted with them, all placed within or in relationship to a traditional dharmic moral order—throws some light on the Hindu peculiarities, variously described and emphasized in the scholarly literature, of the relations of the conventional moral order and "power," of religious and political realms, of priest and king.

In this chapter we will be concerned mostly with details of the types and functions of Bhaktapur's priests and their auxiliary helpers, as well as with those thar -based social roles and functions that are priest-like in one or another more or less covert way. The priestly realm has not only its significant internal divisions but also external contrasts with non-priests which are essential for understanding how Bhaktapur's community life is organized. Those external contrasts are epitomized in the relation of Brahman and king.

It has long been evident to Western scholars that the realms and relations of king and Brahman in South Asian society were different

from those of similar functionaries in most other societies. As Kolenda (1978, 31) put it in a summary review:

As early as the eighth century B.C. , Hindu thought had separated worldly power from other-worldly power. Since then, the two realms have been in the hands of different specialists—worldly power in the hands of the king, other-worldly power in the hands of the priest. In the Hindu ideology, the ritual power of the Brahman priest was more important than the secular power of the king, who was expected to protect and depend upon the priest. . .. Indeed, it was the duty of the king . . . to protect the populace, to ensure conformity to the class system of the time, and to wage war—always under the guidance of his Brahman . . . preceptor. The king was carrying out the religious law (dharma) that was in the keeping of the Brahman priest.

The Hindu king and his fellow Ksatriya^[*] allies, counselors, and warriors protect and enforce the dharma , but their relation to that customary law was, and is, ambiguous. In Robert Lingat's (1973, 210-211) epitome:

The kingship . . . belonged to him who possessed ksatra^[*] ["warlike force," plus "sovereignty"] de facto, . . . i.e. the power to command, whatever might have been his birth and whatever might have been the circumstances which brought him to the throne. Ksatra^[*] confers on the king independence, the right to act to suit himself without depending upon anyone else. The king is independent of his subjects, as is the spiritual preceptor of his pupils and the head of the family of the members of his household. . .. By contrast, Dharma is essentialy a rule of interdependence , founded on a hierarchy corresponding to the nature of things and necessary for the maintenance of the social order. To break away from it is to violate one's destiny and to expose onself to the loss of one's salvation. The peculiar dharma of the king is the protection of his subjects. If he is free to act as he pleases without having to account to anyone for his acts, he acquires merit only when acting in conformity with his dharma . . . . So finally the destroy of the king depends on the way in which he has been able to protect his subjects.

Although it is recognized that some kind of moral responsibility, some kind of "meta-dharma," must guide the king's freedom, his activities as king must, if they are to be successful, violate and transcend, and escape from that "ordinary" Hindu community dharma that is, it is worth repeating, "essentially a rule of interdependence, founded on a hierarchy corresponding to the nature of things and necessary for the maintenance of the social order." In his warrior's relation to the city's external enemies, his manipulative relations to the city's allies, and in his use of violence and power to enforce those internal violations of the civic dharma which that dharma 's sanctions of moral disapproval and karmic retribution cannot in themselves fully control, he must ignore

the morality of interdependence and must perform acts which within the ordinary civic order would be sins.^[1] In contrast, the king as citizen and as person operates within the ordinary dharma and, importantly for our present purposes, within the ordinary civic religion.

In Louis Dumont's statement contrasting the Indian king with kings in other ancient traditional societies where the king was either at the same time the supreme religious functionary or else superior in his status to "his" priests, the Indian king (1970, 68 [emphasis added]):

loses . . . hierarchical preeminence in favor of the priests, retaining for himself power only. . .. Through this dissociation, the function of the king m India has been secularized . It is from this point that a differentiation has occurred, the separation within the religious universe of a sphere or realm opposed to the religious, and roughly corresponding to what we call the political. As opposed to the realm of values and norms it is the realm of force. As opposed to the dharma or universal order of the Brahman, it is the realm of interest or advantage, artha. . . . All [the implications that follow from this] can, m my view be traced back to this initial step. In other words, they would have been impossible if the king had not from the beginning left the highest religious functions to the priest.

These classic discussions of king and Brahman and the "realms" epitomized by their functions illuminate and yet at the same time tend to obscure the relations and functions of king and priest, and the actual internal divisions and interrelations of realms of "religion" on the one hand and "force" on the other. They obscure the different kinds of religion and priestly functions that in Bhaktapur and many places historically like it in South Asia were differentially related to "values and norms" and to "force," and they do not take account of the wider implications of "force" for characterizing a vertical social segment of Bhaktapur's society, within which the king and his paradoxical dharma is a special case.

The hierarchical system of thar s in Bhaktapur assigns roles and functions of two sorts. The roles are sorted into two hierarchical segments of the macrostatus system. One segment—ranging from Brahman to untouchable—is concerned with the manipulation and maintenance of the dharma -supporting symbolically constituted civic social system, whose central organizing metaphor is purity and impurity. This is the nexus of the interdependent life of the civic community. Its proper religion is the religion of the ordinary deities. Its functionaries, grouped as priests in an extended usage suggested by Hocart ([1950] 1960), are the subject of this chapter. The other segment, ranging from king down via farmers through the lowest-status craftsmen, have their representative

functions within another realm that may be disentangled from the symbolically constructed, hierarchical, civic dharma . They deal, in comparison, with a more material world, and with symbolic forms other than those characteristic forms that organize the dharmic community—purity and impurity, karma , and the moral imperatives of the dharma itself. These are the potters, farmers, traders, wood carvers, dyers, and so on, as well as the king and other political and military functionaries. The cultural forms and symbols that shape and give meaning to their functions (in distinction to their status as citizens) have some qualities and relations different from those of the primary symbol technicians. The relation of their roles to hierarchy, and their work to the dharma , is a secondary addition. As citizens, their religion (like the king's) is the ordinary dharmic religion. However, as operatives in a world that has its own independent realities, forces, and forms, and which is necessary for the support, maintenance, and protection of the city's realm of values and norms, they share, in part, the classic situation of the king. Insofar, then, as they deal in "power," in one sense, and not in "norms and values," their realm is complexly related to the larger "religious universe." In relation to the dharmic religion of the ordinary deities, they perform "secular" functions. However, their relation to the religion of the dangerous deities is different. Those deities have the same sort of relation to the civic dharma as do the activities of the king, farmers, and craftsmen. They, and their special worship and meanings, express the realm of value-transcendent power in which the king and others like him operate, and they can be and are used in attempts to augment and protect that power. We have discussed the function of the dangerous deities and of their worship in earlier chapters; the chapters on symbolic enactments that follow will further indicate what they do, and how they do it. But for now we must note that these deities are precisely not "in the realm of values and norms" but, like the city's segment of "material technicians," are within the "realm of force," a force put to the service of those values and norms.

Bhaktapur's priests, including its Brahmans, operate in both these realms, both as the exemplary pure (and, in fact, exemplary impure) priests of the ordinary moral realm, the world of the dharmic , hierarchical, civic order and also as priests of the realm of power, where purity and impurity and the civic values of interdependency are irrelevant. In these two worlds the relations of Brahman to king, of priest to client, are basically different—and, thus, so is the meaning of the priest and his function.