- 1 Many thanks to Greg Sharkey SJ for comments on an earlier version. Full disclosure: in the (...)
1The UNESCO World Heritage sites of the Kathmandu Valley give pride of place to the temples and palaces at the symbolic heart of the three formerly royal cities: Kathmandu itself, Patan and Bhaktapur.1 What gives these ancient Newar cities their character, however, is not just the royal centres but the rabbit warren of lanes and courtyards that make up the rest of the urban fabric. Among these many courtyards, set back from the streets and crossroads, Buddhist monastic courtyards (baha and bahi) loom large. The Tibetologist David Snellgrove, visiting Patan in 1953–54, speculated that the city ‘must have been a kind of vast university-city, differing little in its mode of life from similar towns in mediaeval Europe. In fact, its traditions, its way of life, must have been modelled on the great monastic universities of central India’ (Snellgrove 1957: 102–3). Snellgrove was right that the Buddhism of the Kathmandu Valley – its ideas, its rituals and its architecture – derived directly from the great monastic centres of northern India of the late first millennium, such as Nalanda and Odantapuri. However, his idea that Patan was once a university city like Oxford or Cambridge may have been fanciful. As Locke points out here (p404), Buddhist scholars from India and Tibet visited in the Thakuri period (10th–14th centuries) and many manuscripts were copied in the Kathmandu Valley, but there were no large institutions of learning on the scale of the Indian establishments.
2Snellgrove’s parallel with Oxford and Cambridge may have some mileage in it, nonetheless. Imagine if Oxbridge dons, once they started marrying and having families in the nineteenth century, had, instead of moving out of college, privatised part of a quadrangle in their college and built a house in one corner of the formerly monastic courtyard, while continuing to fulfil their ritual and other duties in college. This is what started happening to many of the Nepal Valley’s monastic courtyards from the fifteenth century onwards. In fact, it is quite likely that ‘married monks’, on today’s model, existed already several centuries earlier.
- 2 For example, Stiller (1973, 1976), Miller (1987, 1990), Locke (1980), Sharkey (2001). On Mars (...)
3John Locke SJ (1933–2009) was born in the USA and died a citizen of Nepal, having spent most of his life in the Himalayan kingdom (it became a republic less than a year before his death). He was an educator, a scholar and a theologian interested in inter-religious dialogue (Sharkey 2009). In the 1980s the Jesuits were deeply embedded in Kathmandu society thanks to the fact that the parents of the boys studying at their school, St Xavier’s, and in due course the boys themselves, made up a significant proportion of the Nepalese Establishment. Nepal’s Tribhuvan University was only just getting going – the Jesuits were among the first to do PhDs there – and most of the other educational establishments in existence today had not yet been set up. The Jesuits were therefore in a position to make a major contribution to intellectual life in Nepal from the 1970s to the 1990s, both through their teaching and through their research. They published pioneering historical and anthropological monographs based on a deep acquaintance with the country and long years of study.2
4Locke’s academic career was devoted to the study of Newar Buddhism, a field in which he was undoubtedly a pioneer. Since Newar Buddhism is the last direct descendant of the north Indian Buddhism of the late first millennium CE, and is consequently the only Buddhist tradition remaining where the liturgy is chanted in Sanskrit, its practices and traditions have a huge significance for world history and the history of religions. Yet Newar Buddhism falls outside the conventional classifications with which Buddhism is taught – Southern or Theravada Buddhism, Northern or Tibetan Buddhism, and Eastern or Chinese/Japanese/Korean Buddhism – and therefore is often ignored or only mentioned in passing by the standard histories and surveys of the subject.
5Locke considered Buddhist Monasteries of Nepal to be his most important work. It does not have the historical and ethnographic narrative unity of Karunamaya: The cult of Avalokitesvara-Matsyendranath in the Valley of Nepal, the book of his PhD thesis (Locke 1980), but, like it, it is the fruit of hard work and focused enquiry. In fact, in terms of the number of years of labour and repeated investigations, with the help of his (then) young assistants, Tirtha Lal Maharjan and Kundan Sthapit, it outstrips Karunamaya. The sheer length of time and amount of research required to cover so many sites over such a large area meant that only a scholar based in Nepal, and only a scholar with a sympathetic support network and gifted with stubborn persistence in the pursuit of knowledge, could have achieved this level of systematic coverage.
6Buddhist Monasteries is nothing less than an encyclopaedic survey of everything that is known about 363 separate Newar Buddhist institutions: 185 in Lalitpur district, 130 in Kathmandu and 48 in Bhaktapur. Some of these are tiny, no more than a small shrine in a forgotten courtyard, owned by a single family; some indeed have disappeared. At the other extreme is Kwa Bahal, the famous Golden Temple of Patan, honorific title Bhaskara Deva Samskarita Hiranyavarna Mahavihara, with 1,750 initiated members in 1985 (today the total is said to be over 6,000). Large Newar Buddhist monasteries, such as the Golden Temple and many others, are included in the pilgrimage routes of Tibetan Buddhists visiting the Kathmandu Valley (Dowman 2020).
7The Newar Buddhist monastery preserves certain architectural elements that are very archaic, especially the smaller, less populated and less wealthy bahi class of vihara. All Newar Buddhist monasteries have, or should have, a caitya and a main deity (kwapadyah), usually Sakyamuni Buddha, and, if they have a functioning sangha or membership, a Tantric god hidden away upstairs. Some monasteries have died out, so that the name and the site are remembered and play a role in collective rituals, but the actual buildings that must have been there are no more. All this is meticulously documented for every one of the 363 sites.
8These sacred sites are controlled by the Vajracharyas and Shakyas, two intermarrying sections of the Buddhist religious elite. They are ‘married monks’. Vajracharya and Shakya boys pass through the monastic initiation rite of cudakarma or bare chuyegu in the baha or bahi of their father, which makes them a member of that particular monastic association or sangha. During this four-day ritual, they enact the role of a monk, receiving alms and eating only pure food. On the fourth day they hand their monastic robe back to their Vajracharya preceptor guru, and embark on the path of the Buddhist householder, all the while incorporating the status of monk (Locke 1975; Gellner 1988, 1992; von Rospatt 2005).
9The monastic status of Shakya and Vajracharya men is acted out once a year during the annual festival of Panchadan, when they circulate to receive alms from the laity, and also when their turn comes to be the ‘god guardian’ (dyahpala) of their monastery, the context in which ancient monastic practices are most faithfully reproduced (Sharkey 2001). I once asked a Vajracharya if he had ever invited Theravada monastics to his house. He replied simply, ‘We ourselves are monks [so we don’t need to]’ (jimi he bhiksuta) (Gellner 1992: 162). Without the monastery architecture and sacred sites documented by Locke, it would have been impossible for Shakyas and Vajracharyas to sustain and legitimate their claim to the elevated status of monk and Buddhist ritual specialist for so many centuries. Until 1951 Shakyas and Vajracharyas who had migrated to hill bazaars throughout the Nepalese hills used to trek long distances, at great expense, bringing their boys to the Kathmandu Valley in order for them to be initiated in their ancestral baha or bahi (Gellner 2010). That they were willing to do this was testament (1) to the exclusive power of the consecrated vihara to confer a sacred status as Buddhist clergy on Shakya and Vajracharya young boys; and (2) to the pervasive fear of outcasting, if their boys were not properly initiated, under the caste-regulated Hindu Rana regime (1845–1951).
10This reissue of Locke’s Buddhist Monasteries of Nepal by Orchid Press is very welcome. The original edition was set by John Locke himself in the early days of word-processing. Although perfectly serviceable, both the font of the original and the reproduction quality of the photographs are showing their age. The layout of the new edition is easier on the eye, particularly the map lists of the three cities. There is a new list of illustrations. A more effective layout has reduced 542 pages to 443 pages. The only thing still missing is an index.
11The book will stand forever as a key reference work. It is a monument of documentation about monuments, essential for anyone interested in the history of Newar Buddhism and the built environment of the Kathmandu Valley. Inevitably, however, the descriptions and the photographs are keyed to a particular moment in time, the 1970s and 1980s. That built environment, despite many people’s best efforts, has been subject to massive change and rebuilding, not to mention the effects of the earthquakes of 2015. It begs the question of how these sacred sites are faring today.
12In Locke’s day there were only a few scholars and isolated individuals interested in heritage. In recent years there has been a huge upsurge in interest and in activism. ‘Stakeholders’, in the contemporary policy jargon, include local groups such as Chiva Chaitya (chivachaitya.org.np), academic initiatives, such as the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (danam.cats.uni-heidelberg.de/), and governmental and international bodies (among others, UNESCO’s Nepal office). What is called for today, I would suggest, is a collaborative, interactive and constantly updated website where Locke’s findings, suitably uploaded and searchable, could be added to and continually updated. In most cases it would be easy enough to add contemporary photographs taken from the same spot where Hugh Downes stood in the 1980s. Locke’s scholarship would then be integrated with other people’s work on Buddhist (and other) monuments, including research by the locals who inhabit the courtyards that Locke loved so much and devoted so much time to exploring and to rescuing from the ignorance of history. Locke himself would doubtless have been delighted to find his work incorporated with local/insider research in this way.