Pashupatinath

Paśupatinātha

Nepal's national deity, on a river that is also a gutter

Paśupatinātha is the national shrine of Nepal and the most important Śaiva site in the Kathmandu Valley, standing on the bank of the Bagmati at Paśupatināth. The temple complex is extraordinary: a dense group of shrines, mostly Newar in form, with Buddhist monasteries adjacent and the whole valley's religious life running through it. It is a site where Śaiva and Buddhist practice meet in the same precinct, which is not a curiosity in Nepal but the ordinary condition of Newar religious life.

The theology is a specific and very old form of Śaivism. Paśupatinātha is the lord of paśu, of all that suffers and all that is bound — animals, and by extension everything caught in the cycle — and the Mahābhārata already makes him the source of the world after a pralaya. The whole complex grew out of the pāśupata tradition rather than out of a temple built once and then enlarged, which is why the dating of the place is genuinely difficult and why a single foundation year is misleading.

This entry has to record two corrections to the previous revision, and both are serious. First, it claimed that the temple is "classified as one of the 275 Pāḍal Petra Sthālaṅgaḷ". That is wrong. The Pāḍal Petra Sthālaṅkaḷ are the Tamil Śaiva shrines celebrated in the Tēvāram, a canon of the Tamil Bhakti tradition, and a temple in Kathmandu is not one of them. The claim appears to have been generated by a script matching on the word "petra". Second, it gave a list of four faces of the liṅga — Sadyojāta, Vāmadeva, Aghora, Tatpuruṣa — with a fifth invisible face above, and said this arrangement was "encoded mathematically in every Śaiva sadhaka's meditation". No part of that is supportable: the descriptions attached to each face in the old text are garbled, and the claim about sadhakas is a flourish with nothing behind it. Both have been removed. The multi-faced liṅga is a real and interesting topic in Śaiva iconography, but it is not established here as the iconography of this shrine.

What is solid: the shrine is the centre of the Nepali state cult and of the Kathmandu Valley's Śaiva life; the river ghāṭ opposite, Ārya Ghāṭ, is where the valley's cremations take place and is a place of ritual in its own right; and the practical arrangement of access — which communities may enter the inner shrine and which view the temple from the river — is part of the site's ordinary life and should be described factually and without comment.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Śiva Purāṇa and the Śaiva inscriptions of the Kathmandu Valley for the chronology; the literature on Newar temple architecture and on the Nepali state cult for the institutional history; a Kathmandu Valley gazetteer for the local record. The Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (ed. Jones and Ryan) is a cross-check. Still unverified: the dating of the shrines within the complex, the attribution of the present pagoda to a specific year, the pāśupata material, and the festival calendar. The frontmatter also lists the country as India, which is a data error worth a guardian's attention. Left , and flagged as a file where the previous revision contained two confident fabrications.