Gods With Temples and Shrines—Some Numbers

Shrines and temples are the seats of one segment of Bhaktapur's super-naturals, the "Puranic^[*] deities" of classical, post-Vedic Hinduism. By our count and criteria there are about 120 active shrines and temples within or just outside the boundaries of Bhaktapur. They are one of the two sets of spatially fixed representations in the public city; the other is a numerous and heterogenous class of "deified stones." The shrines and temples are distributed among these deities as follows, with the number of shrines and temples given in parentheses: Visnu^[*] (29), Siva (28), Ganesa^[*] (24), Sarasvati (3), Bhimasena (3), Nataraja (2), Hanuman (2), Krsna^[*] (2), Rama with his consort Sita (3), Bhairava (1), Jagannatha (2), Dattatreya (now regarded primarily as a combination of Siva and Visnu^[*] ) (1), and the group of dangerous or Tantric goddesses that includes some fourteen major named forms (26). We thus have some twenty-six classical Hindu divinities represented in public urban space. Eighty-two of these shrines and temples have various kinds of temple priests, pujari (see chap. 10). The other structures do not have pujari. s We will discuss the spatial locations and the uses of the various temples and shrines later in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, but we may note here that about one-quarter of the temples and shrines are primarily related to the city as a whole, while the rest are related to one or another of the city's major constitutive spatial divisions.