Kathmandu

by Thomas Bell

the high Buddhist castes, Shakya and Vajracarya.

Daniel Wright was the surgeon at the British residency between 1866−1876, a decade before Bendall’s visit.

Bhatbhateni, the location of Kathmandu’s favourite supermarket. In

The king renamed the farmer ‘Lalita’, meaning ‘beautiful’.

Patan's origin

And Lalita’s farming caste still live there; the guardians, as anthropologists now believe, of the city’s deepest layer of tradition.

The new city was to be built in the shape of a sword . . . and dealings to the amount of a lakh of rupees were to be transacted in it daily. The Raja, being thus directed, founded the city

Origin of KTM

There is a special class of people who determine the value of houses and lands. These people are now called Chhibhandail, and they make a mystery of their trade.

To protect himself from evil spirits, witches and epidemics, he put an image of the monkey-god Hanuman beside his palace gate.

Hanuman 皇宫前

the sixteenth century the family’s name was Buddhacharya, and that one of its members had founded the Mahabuddha temple.22

In Asia old objects are not generally considered beautiful for their age, which is a peculiarly Western taste. New things are preferred, so ancient wooden carvings are periodically touched up with colourful enamel paints.

renewed with fresh donations. When temples are rebuilt after an earthquake, which occur on average about once a century, old pieces of carved timber might be reused even as the structure is altered and worn out parts replaced.

In this way these holy buildings are neither old nor new. Rather, like other things in nature, such as a whirlpool, a forest, or a coral reef, they a...

She considered me pitifully ignorant of the realities of nature.

Nasahdya, the god of sound, is represented by an empty space; a triangular hole in a wall that opens his passage through the buildings, because he can only travel in straight lines.

三角形uYog mentioned the hollow triangle on the wall of patan museum, same?

Even heaps of reeking trash were holy, if they were in the right place. Even the dogs in the street and the crows on the roof were gods, and had their annual festivals.

神,无处不在

[I saw in Patan] a large number of destroyed houses, as the natives rarely repair a house: rather, anyone who regards himself as a man of distinction constructs himself a new house and lets that of his father decay.1 —Prince Waldermar of Prussia (visited in 1845)

Bhaktapur Post-earthquake reconstruction Most people simply abandon old house and build a new one somewhere else

Kathmandu people do not find the old houses picturesque. Sometimes a magnificent carved window, centuries old, is cut in half when a brother—inheriting his part of the ancestral property—rebuilds his side in brightly painted concrete.

The family priest will determine whether or not a proposed building site is auspicious or is, for example, already occupied by naga serpents. An astrologer will determine whether the venture is a wise investment, and the best time to start work.

家族祭祀和占星家在房屋建造中的作用

The foundation was laid but before the first storey was complete he and his brother fell ill.

建屋的风水故事

For the rest that was achieved more gradually, until a space was enclosed by four houses and an extended family enjoyed their privacy and security within. This courtyard is a chowk, where children play, clothes are washed, grain is dried, men gamble at cards and the family eats feasts. The chowks are the basic unit of the old quarters. The height of the roofs’ ridge beams, where they met each other end to end or at right angles, was roughly the same. The skyline was a hand-knitted pattern of clay-tiled slopes, with the pagoda-roofs of the temples rising above them.

Chowk 庭院的建造与天际线

不同的见解，环境污染

‘Fortunate and upright man! May this house be well favoured; may it be durable; may it be without flaw; may it be a dwelling place of Laksmi; may the builder live long; may his heart’s desire be fulfilled!’

a wedge-shaped brick, which covers the joints and gives the most prestigious buildings a smooth burnished lustre. These walls are prone to bulging under their own weight so a wooden frame is made to stiffen them, like the steel inside reinforced concrete but much more expensive. Where the timbers show on the surface they are decorated with carved serpents and the heads of animals.

尼泊尔的砖木结合特色

At every stage of the construction, as the door jambs and lintels, window frames, floors, ridge beam and roof tiles are put in place, a puja is done and red and yellow powder is smeared on the unfinished building.

The ground floor is a shop, storeroom or workshop. The sleeping and living quarters are in the middle and the purest and most private places, the kitchen and the puja room, are nearest to heaven.

when people refer to a house they often mean the site it stands on, and every structure that has ever stood on that site.

When someone breaks down the beautiful old brick and timber house his ancestor made, and builds for his family in their ancient place a new concrete home (ugly inside and out, and cold in the winter) the new structure retains the centuries-old shape of the plot and the hierarchy between the storeys above it.

king’s palace at the centre, surrounded at the margins by the temples of the Eight Mother Goddesses, by the twelve sacred bathing places and the eight cremation grounds.6

mandala

Vajracharya caste—a gubhaju—

because I had read that gubhajus reveal the real truth of their religion only to the initiated, and there would be no question of my ever receiving it.

the Eight Mother Goddesses, whose temples are in a ring around the city.

comparing with Discover Bhaktapur

but I may as well have been asking ‘How many hamburgers make a Wednesday?’ for all the sense my questions seemed to make to the gubhaju .

Altogether there are six yonis,’

caste has its own affinities to different gods, according to its nature and occupation.

Jyapu men (of the farming caste)

Jyapu women have an affinity with Hariti, the Buddhist goddess of smallpox, who has power over young chil...

On the city’s outskirts, the low castes, by performing unclean tasks such as butchery or drum making, or conducting death rituals, absorb pollution on behalf of the community, allowing the high castes to stay pure. The edges of the mandala, or the areas beyond the ordered life of the city, are the land of the dead.

low caste&high caste

where the demons and the witches also live,

their affinities are with the lower and more dreadful spirits.

but at Matya it takes ten hours or more to trace every tiny passage to every hidden chaitya in a mazy clockwise circuit that never crosses its own path.

where is this path

Mrs Hirakaji painted a track of red clay up the stairs, from the threshold to the puja room, to guide the goddess of wealth inside.

Since parliamentary democracy was established in 1990 two political parties had dominated the stage. The Nepali Congress was the principal party of government. They were the epitome of democratic ideals and personal integrity until a decade in power corrupted that image. Now they stood exposed as flabby hypocrites, their leaders climbing over one another to get in bed with every power centre and business interest. The alternative was the Communist Party of Nepal−Unified Marxist Leninist, which was known as the UML. They had long since torn off their ideological pyjamas.

2 major parties

‘You are high-quality person and I am low-quality person,’ he told me, ‘but I have a most beautiful wife and you say to me “On this night send your wife to me.” So I send her, but I get angry and start the revolution.’7 This

Earlier that summer we’d been on holiday together. We went to Delhi, Jaipur, Fatehpur Sikri and the Taj Mahal; places that she wanted to see because she’d read about them in a novel. I thought she was reading novels about India because I was in Nepal,

Love

The next man to peel back a layer was Sylvain Lévi. He began studying Sanskrit in Paris in 1882 because Professor Abel Bergaigne did not have

any other students. Six years later Bergaigne was dead and Lévi, aged 25, became the new professor of Sanskrit at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes. He set himself a daunting, lifelong task, to trace how India had shaped the cultures of Asia through the spread of Buddhism, which first flourished in India but had long since disappeared from there. He mastered Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese and various other languages he would need.

He thought of the Nepal Valley as an historical laboratory that reproduced the phases of the Indian past on a miniature scale, where he could unpick ‘the order and the plan hidden under the muddled mass of events’.

The ‘childish rancour’ of the priest prevented him from entering the precinct, but he persuaded the Maharaja to provide four soldiers who excavated the buried portion of the column and took rubbings. The Sanskrit poem they delivered to Lévi is the most important text in Kathmandu’s early history. Dated 464 AD, the inscription describes the immediate ancestors and the victorious battles of King Manadeva. Manadeva was beautiful, a world-class hero. He had soft skin like worked gold, and well-fleshed shoulders. He was ‘love incarnate, a festival of flirtation for lovers.’9 He was also skilled in the use of weapons of attack and defence, and he had ‘received initiation in the fashion of the Kshatriyas, by combat and battle’. But especially, the poem praises Manadeva’s mother, the beloved Queen Rajyavati. She conferred the crown on her son after his father’s sudden death. She was ‘of pure race’, pious and loving, and so dedicated to her husband that Manadeva had to beg her not to commit suttee on his pyre. Instead, she completely purified herself, and gave all her fortune to the Brahmins to increase her dead husband’s merit.

He constructed a chronology starting from the earliest authentic record of ‘Nepal’, which comes as a reference to a vassal state that traded with the plains, carved on a stone pillar at Allahabad in northern India in the fourth century ad.

the earliest authentic record of Nepal

Lévi thought the process was based on Hinduism’s capacity to assimilate contradictions.