Pilgrimage Gods of the Royal Center
There are a number of shrines and temples that are found for the most part in the large square in front of the Malla palace and within the Taleju temple complex which represent gods that are not important to the public ritual or symbolic life of the city. These include such forms and appellations as Pasupatinatha, Guhyesvari, Annapuna[*] , Jagannatha, Ramasvara, Kedarnatha, and Badrinatha. These shrines were erected by the Malla kings to represent gods found at famous pilgrimage centers in India[63] and in other parts of Nepal, particularly the Valley shrine complex, Pasupatinatha. These shrines are now maintained and worshiped in a perfunctory way by Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in their continuing function as the Malla kings' priests. They were conceived of as places where worship could be a substitute for pilgrimages for the convenience of the court. The Malla kings, local Brahmans say now, could get as much merit from erecting them and in subsequent generations praying at them as by going on a pilgrimage. It is also said that such shrines were especially important when war or other external conditions made such pilgrimages impossible. These sites are now sometimes worshiped by passersby or local residents, and sometimes the local Pasupatinatha and Guhyesvari may still be worshiped as a substitute for a visit to their main shrines at the Pasupatinatha temple complex.
The structures are of interest to our present study in that in contrast to most of the temples and shrines and associated gods of Bhaktapur, they have a reference to real space and location elsewhere than Bhaktapur and its immediate environment. The placement of these sites at
Bhaktapur's Royal center, their Royal use, and their identification with "foreign" shrines, echoes, perhaps, a symbolic device for relating a city as a "cosmo-magical" symbol, as Paul Wheatley phrases it, to an "empire." Wheatley illustrates this with a summary of Paul Mus's (1936, 1937) study of twelfth-century Bayon in Cambodia, a city that contained statues of provincial gods, "so that Bayon as a whole constituted a pantheon of the personal and regional cults practiced in the various parts of the kingdom. By thus assembling them at the sacred axis of Kambujadesa, the point where it was possible to effect an onto-logical passage between the worlds so that the royal power was continually replenished by divine grace from on high, Jayarvarmin, the King, brought these potentially competitive forces under his own control" (Wheatley 1971, 432).
Traditional Bhaktapur's "imperial" impulses began to fade rapidly beyond the boundaries of the Valley, but they were, in however attenuated form, an aspect of royalty and its symbolism, as we will see in other contexts. The loss of Bhaktapur's Malla kings, that is, of its "own kings," exaggerated and distorted the balance toward Bhaktapur's inner orientations. The "Gods of the Royal Center" are, perhaps, a wistful sign of past Royal conceits.