Obligatory Religious Practices
Every family has its own god-room situated high and near the back of the house, i.e. as privately as possible. For the women of the house, keeping the god-room, the kitchen and the storeroom (considered the abode of Laksnu, the goddess of wealth) clean and briefly worshipping all the deities present, is part of their daily religious duty.
That done, one person from the house, again usually female, visits the shrines of the locality, making offerings at each.Men who have taken some kind of initiation must also perform a daily ritual: this is a lifelong personal obligation they have undertaken. Mostly this ritual consists in the recitation of sacred formulas and prayers; depending on the type of initiation and the individual’s piety, it may last for anything from ten minutes to two or three hours. Until this daily worship has been performed no food may pass his mouth. The difficulty this obligation imposes means that those who take initiation are usually old or at least middle-aged. In any case neither young men, unless of the priestly castes, nor children are expected to take any great interest in taxing religious observances.
Just as cleaning the house each morning is a religious act for women, so cleaning the shrine and bathing the deity is an obligatory daily task for men who are temple-priests, either permanently or in rotation, and for those families that have established their own private shrines. In every temple of any size the first thing that occurs early in the morning is this ‘regular worship’ before outside worshippers may present their offerings. At the temples of popular deities huge crowds gather during which the priests recite prayers and bathe the deity. The water is then sprayed onto the assembled worshippers as a blessing. Out of simple faith and devotion this regular worship occurs, scaled down, at thousands of other small shrines and temples every day, though no one may be there to observe or bring offerings.
The high and pure gods, and for the most part the Tantric deities, are the preserve of the priestly castes of the two religions—Brahmins and Karmacaryas (Hindu Tantric priests) for Hindu gods, and Vajracaryas (literally ‘master of the diamond [Vehicle]’) and Sakyabhiksus (‘Buddhist monks’) for the Buddhist deities. But many other deities, worshipped in common by the followers of both religions, are served by priests of other castes: Ganesa shrines for instance are usually served by farmers and even the Untouchables have temples where they have the right to keep all offerings, namely those of the Mother Goddesses that ring the city and protect it from external evil influences.Every month, calculated according to the moon’s cycles, certain holy days recur: the no-moon day, the eighth (sacred to the Bodhisattva Lokesvara), the eleventh (on which no meat may be sold, sacred to Narayana), and the full-moon day; in the waning half of the month, there is the fourteenth (sacred to various deities); also holy are the days that the sun passes into a new zodiacal sign and initiates a new solar month (likewise sacred to the Bodhisattva Lokesvara). On all these days religious observance brings greater merit: both men and women take greater pains with their daily worship, visit more shrines and say more prayers than usual. At large temples special rituals mark these holy days. Similarly each day of the week is holy to a particular deity, for instance Tuesday to Ganesa, Saturday to Mahakala and to many of the Mother Goddesses. On these days their shrines will be many times more crowded than on normal days.
Every year numerous annual festivals are celebrated in the home. On these days it is forbidden to eat cooked rice, the consumption of which involves mild impurity (that is why one’s daily ritual must be completed before eating). Instead parboiled flattened rice, buffalo meat cooked in various ways and numerous tasty vegetable and bean dishes are eaten. But this feast occurs only after the head of the household and his wife have performed the ritual necessary to that day.
The following day daughters of the household who have been given away in marriage to other families must be invited along with their children; on a few important festivals their husbands will also be included in the invitation. In this way women maintain frequent contact with their natal home, and their children come to regard their maternal uncles with special affection. Men say that they have a religious duty to feed their married sisters and daughters whenever they celebrate anything because, by marrying into another family, they have lost the right to inherit from their own parents.In addition to the annual festivals which everyone observes there are many particular to individual areas, castes or guthis. People also observe their own birthdays by making offerings at various temples. Membership of most guthis is optional, but it is not something lightly abandoned. If one’s ancestor has founded a Buddhist caitya (Buddhist cult object), or donated a tympanum, for example, to a temple, every year the anniversary of the donation must be marked by a reconsecration: the family priest must be called, a fire sacrifice lasting several hours (during which all participants fast) must be performed, and finally a feast served.
The various stages of life are also marked by religious ritual. Only by ritual can a house be purified after a birth or a death. These occasions implicate relatives too, so that Newars often describe how closely they are related by mentioning the degree of mourning they are obliged to observe for each other’s death. During these periods of impurity it is forbidden to worship deities, except indirectly or from outside a given area. Auspicious stages of life are also defined religiously: a child’s first rice-feeding is a time of great joy and the help of the gods is required to ensure its healthy growth. In later life Newar girls pass through a ceremony in which they are ‘married to a hel fruit’; according to Buddhist priests the girls are marrying the god Kumara, and according to Brahmins, Narayapa.
The bel fruit is, on learned interpretations, just a witness, but for ordinary Newars these are academic matters. Ritually speaking the girl is then married, and married for life, so that even if her human husband dies she is not supposed to suffer the indignity of being a widow (in practice however high-caste women do suffer some stigma). Girls must also undergo a twelve-day rite in which they stay in a room without seeing the sun; its purpose is, it seems, to defuse the danger of their imminent menstruation. Boys pass through a single though complex rite called ‘tying the loin-cloth’; for Brahmins and high-caste Hindus this also involves the donning of the sacred thread; boys of the Buddhist pnestly- monk caste spend four days as a Buddhist monk. All these rites mark the transition to adulthood, so that the boy or girl is now considered a full member of his or her caste and family.Marriage, too, is a long and complex ceremony, sanctified at every stage with worship of the gods. If an old person reaches 77, 80 or 99 years they are also entitled to a further rite which consecrates them as becoming ever more divine themselves. All members of their lineage come to show their respect and do obeisance to them. Finally death is marked by ceremonies extending over many years. Every year, at least for the first two years, and usually for many years afterwards, a deceased father receives worship and ‘feeding’ from his eldest son, a mother from her youngest son. The complex ceremonies performed on behalf of the dead are felt to be a great help in times of bereavement, since they give those left behind concrete measures to take on behalf of their loved one.
The higher castes, both Hindu and Buddhist, are more punctilious in observing these various fife-cycle rituals than the low castes. In fact more ritual involvement in general is part of the way in which ‘high’ caste is defined. The life-cycle rites are seen, especially in the Hindu view, as purifying; some Buddhists tend to play down the importance of particular rites, but they, like all Newars, see the undertaking of the rules and restrictions involved in ritual in general as a sign of commitment to the religious life.