Divinities: Housing and Setting
We have used "temples and shrines" as a covering phrase for the various settings in which the divinities are found, but that setting is more complex. Local usage differentiates "temples" (dega :, from Sanskrit, devagrha[*] ); "god-houses" (dya: che[n] ); pith (Sanskrit, pitha ) "hypaethral shrines"; and an otherwise nonspecified residual of "gods' places"—stones, fountains, trees, and so on. There is also a class of supernatural beings, ghosts, and spirits who have no anchored setting, airy nothings lacking a local habitation, if not a name. This lack of a home, like the vagueness of their form, is an essential aspect of this latter group's meaning and use.
1. Temples, dega:s.
These are buildings of various degrees of elaborateness (see fig. 10), acting as foci for the worship and the spatial influence of the particular god (or gods) they contain. They add to the meaning of their contained god their own symbolic meanings (Kramrish 1946). The historical connections and stylistic and structural features of Newar (and Nepalese) temples have been treated in monographs by Weisner (1978) and Bernier (1970) and as part of larger studies by Korn (1976) and Slusser (1982). Bhaktapur has two kinds of temple buildings with very different external appearances: the traditional Indian form and the tiered-roof "Nepalese" temple, which somewhat resembles the "pagoda" temples of China and Japan. These two local styles are not differentially named, and they do not differ in function.[3]
Mary Slusser (1982, 128) writes of the Newar temple (her remarks applying to Hindu temples in general):
The dwellings of the gods of Nepal are quite unlike those in many other parts of the world that are designed to house both the divinity and a congregation assembled to worship. Despite many collective sacred rituals, Nepali worship is fundamentally an individual matter. The temple, therefore needs to make no provision for a congregation. With notable exceptions, the worshiper ordinarily does not penetrate the temple at all. He tenders his offerings
Figure 10.
A Newar-style temple. The Natapwa(n)la temple m Ta:marhi
Square.
through a priestly intermediary from whom, in return, he receives the physical sign of the god's blessings (prasada ). Further, not only is the god within the temple an object of worship so is the temple itself.
The "notable exception" for Bhaktapur includes some of the events at the royal temple complex, Taleju, where large numbers of people are involved as actors and congregation. But Slusser's remarks generally characterize Bhaktapur's other dega: s. In Bhaktapur, as we shall see, the proper loci for "congregations" are in other spaces.
2. God-houses, dya: che(n)s.
Although dega: , "temple," is ultimately also derived from a Sanskrit phrase for "god's house," the dya: che(n) (literally in Newari "God's house," dya: , god, plus che[n] , house) is where portable images of divinities are kept. These images are carried outside for various rituals, processions, or festivals, and then returned to the house. Some of these buildings are quite elaborate in themselves. Although many important portable gods have their own god-house, many portable images are kept within a temple, where they are separate and distinguished from the fixed temple image of the divinity.
3. Shrines.
There are many figures representing divinities in Bhaktapur that are not enclosed by buildings. These may be free standing statues or simply carved or natural stones. The latter shrines are "aniconic." Often arches or canopies are placed behind or over these representations. Included here are the "hypaethral" or open-to-the-skies shrines of the nine Mandalic[*] Goddesses. These shrines are pith (Sanskrit pitha ), a class of shrines of certain Tantric goddesses in the classic Hindu tradition marking places where pieces of the goddess Sati's dismembered body fell from the sky (see below). Slusser (1982, 325) claims that some temples of the Newar Tantric goddesses reflect such hypaethral origins:
Many [goddesses] have only hypaethral shrines. Still others have had temples built over what were obviously once typical hypaethral shrines. Characteristically, the sanctums of such later-day enclosures are very open, the temple's multiple doorways or colonnades permitting an unobstructed view, and the sanctum itself often sunken well below the present ground level. These sunken and airy sanctums have much to say about the antiquity of many of these goddesses and their ultimate chthonic origins. Symbols of such divinities should be open to the skies and woe to the misguided votary who closes them in.
4. Non-Newar Hindu structures.
Bhaktapur has many Buddhist religious structures—stupas, vihara s (religious centers derived from monastic precursors), and god-houses, as well as non-Newar Hindu centers (matha[*] s) for holy men, which are peripheral to our present concerns.