Nepal Mandal: A Pilgrim's Guide to the Kathmandu Valley
From the Preface: For the generation of Nepalis who witnessed King Mahendra's palace revolution in the late 1950s, tantric dharma was hermetically sealed and no outsiders gained access to the secret rituals. This was contrary to the practice of Tibetans-in-exile who welcomed outsiders into their Buddhist mandal with open arms. It was not merely the secrecy that beckoned investigation into Newar Tantra, for both Nepali Buddhist and Hindu dharmas were relics of pre-Muslim India, reminiscent of a time when Indian tantric culture was still vibrant and creative. Gloriously free of European, Christian dualism, it was a culture that had as its summum bonum the nondual awareness that post-war European consciousness so sorely lacked, a fleeting glance of which was to be provided in the 1960s social revolution. Wandering through Nepal Mandal, looking through Tibetan vajrayana spectacles, imbibing the tantric ambience, it was quite possible to absorb osmotically the quality of Newar Tantra, the nature of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, gods and goddesses.
The text of this book was written cumulatively over the last decades of the 20th century, during which Nepal Mandal experienced a wrenching cultural change. A maoist guerrilla rebellion was the outward sign of this. The massacre of King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah and his family in the year 2001 and the coronation and subsequent dethronement of his brother Gyanendra were the constitutional corollary: The twenty-first century has witnessed the development of an unstable democracy in a country without significant financial means, or industrial potential, to support itself. The forced cultural development from medieval kingdom in the early 1960s to a young and unformed democracy has involved depreciation of the past and a preference for imported cultural license and IT marvels.
We deplore this change. We regret the loss of the old and the adulation of the new. We lament the eagerness of Newar craftsmen to sell themselves to purveyors of decorative, even pornographic art, to rebuild their mandirs not for worship but for tourists' eyes, to sell the objects of their grandfathers' veneration to the highest foreign bidder. Worse is the replacement of the ancient sense of organic harmony and traditional form with cheap imported style and fashion, demolition of old classical buildings and temples and replacement of them with concrete mausoleums or roads, and the transformation of living-quarters into tourist arcades.
As if to punctuate a period of cultural, social and political upheaval, in 2015 the long-awaited earthquake shook the country. The succession of tremors was most mercifully founded closer to the principal fault-line in the Himalayas to the north, unexpectedly slight damage done in the towns and villages of Nepal Mandal rather than the wholesale destruction and loss of life that had been feared. The structural damage done to the sacred buildings of old Nepal Mandal has not been evaluated in this book. Perhaps the gods do send messages through earth movements as the people believe.
