Temple and Shrine Priests

At the time of this study there were approximately 119 temples and shrines in active use in the Newar Hindu system throughout the city.^[40] Thirty-five of these had no attending priests. The others had priestly attendants, pujari s, whose duty, for the most part, is to worship the deity twice a day, in the morning and the evening. Those temples whose deity may be the focus of an annual festival (chaps. 12-16) will have an additional image, a jatra image, which may be carried in a festival procession or otherwise shown to the public by the pujari . In the larger temples, above all in the Taleju temple, there may be a staff of priests with more elaborate responsibilities.

At the time of the study the pujari s included twenty-four Ra-

jopadhyaya Brahmans, one Lakhae Brahman, twenty-one Jha Brahmans, two Bhatta^[*] Brahmans, thirty-six Karmacaryas, and one Shaivite ascetic.^[41] The Karmacaryas are pujari s at those temples where blood sacrifice is required—the temples of Ganesa^[*] , and the temples and god-houses of the dangerous deities. The other pujari s serve the temples and shrines of the various benign deities in a seemingly random way as far as their relations to particular deities are concerned. The relations of particular priests to particular temples is a matter of the history of each temple—who built it, and for what purposes, and what happened subsequently. Shrines and temples built by the Mallas or Chathariya often have Rajopadhyaya pujari s, even if they are now of minor use. Some temples reportedly had Rajopadhyaya pujari s in the past, but as relations with patrons and the economic desirability of the position changed, were given over to one of the other groups. Some other temples were built by farming-level thar s, notably the Kumha:, the potters, and had Jha pujari s from the time of their establishment. Most of the temples with Jha pujari s are minor ones whose deities do not have jatra s. The most important temple they officiate at is the Dattatreya Temple, whose major importance is as a pilgrimage site for non-Newar Hindu pilgrims. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, although they serve many presently unimportant temples of the benign deities, still also serve most of the important ones—important in terms of either the status of their builders or their ongoing city-wide importance.