Bhaktapur As A Mandala^[*] : The Nine Mandalic^[*] Section

When Bhaktapur is conceived of as a yantra placed within a bounding mandala^[*] , the segmentation of its interior space is now at issue. Now the Eight Mothers, the Astamatrkas^[*] , not only protect the external boundaries of the city at the eight points of the compass but also individually protect the particular octant of the city lying in their general direction and, thus, under their influence. The protective goddesses for the octants are Brahmani to the east; Mahesvari to the southeast, Kumari to the south; Bhadrakali^[*] (sometimes represented as another goddess, Vaisnavi^[*] ) to the southwest; Varahi to the west; Indrani^[*] to the northwest, Mahakali to the north, and Mahalaksmi^[*] to the northeast (map 2).^[12]

Each goddess has a "god-house" in her city segment, where her portable images is kept (map 2). During one of the year's major festiv-

als, Biska: (chap. 14), the images are brought from the interior of the city each to its boundary shrine, and the internal image and the external aniconic shrine are united. The emphasis has shifted from the protection of the boundary to an internal radiation of the power of the goddesses. That power not only plays over the eight peripheral octants into which the city is divided but is also focused and concentrated at the center of the mandala^[*] , in the shrine or pitha of still another, a ninth goddess, Tripurasundari. This Goddess protects the city's central area in a circle around her. The city is thus divided into nine areas—a circular center and eight peripheral sectors. We may call these nine segments "mandalic^[*] sections." These nine divisions are also conceived by Bhaktapur theorists as a lotus, with a center and eight petals, a very common Hindu form, corresponding to one classical Indian ideal village form (Dutt 1925, 29).

Each mandalic^[*] segment is designated by its protective goddess plus any term for area or place, for example, Mahakali ya ilaka , signifying the territory under Mahakali's protection. People are thought to belong to the mandalic^[*] section in which their father's patriline had been "established." That is, if they move to another part of the city, their protective goddess and that of their descendants born in the new section is the goddess of the mandalic^[*] section where they had previously, and presumably "always," lived. After marriage, a wife is considered to belong to her husband's mandalic^[*] section and ordinarily prays to that section's goddess, although she is still related to her natal goddess in those rituals of her natal family in which she continues to be involved.

The mandalic^[*] segment that one belongs to determines which specific Astamatrka^[*] shrine or pitha one must visit during certain important rituals, particularly during those associated with the samskara s, or rites of passage. During the annual harvest festival, Mohani, in which the whole city is supposed to visit each of the nine pitha s in daily turn over nine days, the people in each goddess's section are responsible for decorating her pitha and god-house on her particular day. In some Tantric initiations for higher-level thar s, the particular mantra used and the tutelary god assigned to the person being initiated is based on his particular mandalic^[*] segment (chap. 9).

The central goddess Tripurasundari is, as we will discuss in the next chapter, the proper kind of dangerous goddess to be at the center of the mandala^[*] 's power. She is a "full" goddess, and the peripheral forms are partial and more specialized. She is represented at the center of the lotus or mandala^[*] where power is concentrated and at its maximum, and

sometimes to similar effect as a point sending out rays of power in each of the eight directions of the compass to each of the eight pitha s at the boundaries. In contradistinction to the way the city uses other "full," maximally powerful forms of the Goddess (such as Taleju and Bhagavati), however, and in spite of this schematic superiority to the eight peripheral goddesses, there is no special emphasis of any kind now on Tripurasundari's central shrine, nor on the central mandalic^[*] section that she protects. In action and interpretation, Tripurasundari (in her function as a central pitha goddess) is the exact equal of the other Mandalic^[*] Goddesses. Some local diagrams of Bhaktapur as a mandala^[*] have the Newari word for king, juju , written next to Tripurasundari. Some Bhaktapur informants speculate that the shrine's centrality may have reflected a possible ancient relationship to the twelfth-century royal palace, Tripura, which they believe to have been near the present pitha , and they assume that the Tripurasundari pitha may have then been the special shrine for the king and his court (cf. Slusser, 1982, vol. I, p. 345ff.). In the seventeenth century the court and its associated temple of Taleju was moved to its present western site.^[13] Tripurasundari lost her central political importance. This suggests that she remains as a striking example of a once powerful symbolic statement that later lost much of its social, ritual, and personal meaning in a transformed Bhaktapur, where now the curious thing about her is the absence of what she once was.