The Sacred House: Domestic Space as Mandala
‘Cosmologies have more than aesthetic or intellectual interest. They are not simply fantasies of the mind floating about the hard realities of day-to-day living. They derive from lived experiences and at the same time give them meaning and direction.’
Yi-Fu Tuan, Man and Nature
Kholagaun Chhetri domestic space is a mandala. It consists of the house building and the compound that surrounds and encloses it. A mandala is a diagram of Hindu [tantric] cosmology that uses geometric space as a mode of representation. In Nepal, there is convincing evidence that Newars, the indigenous Hindu/Buddhist inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley, explicitly used the mandala form in the design of its cities, neighbourhoods, temples and houses.1 Chhetris of Kholagaun do not describe their houses as mandalas. Instead, in their everyday domestic practices as well as in the material and ritual construction of their houses, they build mandalas into their domestic space so that living in a house is at the same time an intimate lived experience and embodied knowledge of the divine cosmos. Further, the mandala form is one with which they, like Newars, are intimately familiar:
One lives and moves always within a series of ..mandalas: the Nepal mandala [the Kathmandu Valley], the mandalas of the cities, and the mandalas of house or temple. Conscious of being surrounded by these forms, it is not surprising that Newars tend to reproduce that form in all aspects of their lives…the order of the mandala has also become as habitual for Newars as linear constructions have for us. (Shepherd 1985:103)
Kholagaun Chhetris also move within the Nepal Mandala, the roughly circular Kathmandu Valley surrounding its sacred central cities and temples, as well as others. One of these is Chār Nārāyan, composed of the four Vishnu/Narayan shrines guarding the four quarters of the Valley and defining a mandala oriented by the cardinal directions: Ichangu Narayan in the north-west, Changu Narayan in the north-east, Bisankhu Narayan in the south-east and Shikhar Narayan in the southwest. In early November, when Vishnu wakes from his four months of sleep, Kholagaun Chhetris, along with other Nepalis, celebrate the event, known as Haribodhini Ekādasi, by fasting and travelling to Bisankhu Narayan Shrine, located on a hill just across the rice fields from their hamlet, where they worship Vishnu. This is also an occasion for the 36-mile pilgrimage to all four Narayan Shrines2 during which devotees embody the Nepal Mandala in their day-long circuit of travel and worship. Villagers say that everyone should do this pilgrimage at least once in their lives.
This chapter sets out how Chhetris of Nepal experience space: its nature, its organization and people’s relation to it. My theme is that, much like the Newars (Shepherd 1985), the mandala is the form in which Chhetris conceptualize space and I describe how, as a configuration of space, the mandala encodes not just Hindu [tantric] cosmology but also the means of acquiring knowledge of it. I then turn to the Hindu architectural texts—the Vastu Shastra—and commentaries upon them to show how this codified design system incorporates the cosmology and spatial principles of the mandala into the orientation of the house, room layout and location of domestic activities. I abstract from the mandala, and the Vastu Shastra’s use of it in architectural design, two spatial configurations that Kholagaun Chhetris build into houses and that give their dwellings a duality of structure and purpose: as auspicious places for the production of worldly prosperity with its attendant attachment to worldly things and the illusion caused by it; and as pure places for the attainment of religious knowledge through detachment and the attendant liberation from re-birth in the world.
I am not proposing that the relationship between the Vastu Shastra—including the incorporation of the mandala—and everyday domestic spatial practice is linear or causal. The Vastu Shastra and the mandala are not blueprints, normative rules, legitimising a hegemonic vedic tradition (Pollock quoted in Rowell 1993:471) that Kholagaun Chhetris explicitly and consciously adopt in the design, construction and use of their houses. Yet, as I will show in the following chapters, Kholagaun Chhetris’ architectural and spatial domestic practices appear to follow the Vastu Shastra—particularly in the orientation of their houses in relation to the cardinal directions and in the concern with the centre point. However, this is not because they are consciously using the specific prescriptions of these texts in the design of the room layout and use of their house spaces in the form of the mandala. Rather, it is because the Vastu Shastra and the everyday lifeworld of the Householder, for whose activities houses are designed to accommodate, draw upon the same cosmology, the former in an explicit and codified way, the latter in an implicit and taken-for-granted way. Still in the following I use codified architectural texts as well as treatises on the mandala—including their explanatory discourse of symbolism—to identify some of its important spatial features that I will argue in later chapters are spatially manifest in the both the intentional and conventional architecture of Chhetri houses and embodied in everyday domestic activities and rituals.
Mandala: A Cosmological Map
Throughout this book, I use the term ‘mandala’ in the generic sense of a mystic diagram.3 However, in Nepal, people use at least two terms, ‘mandala’ and ‘yantra’ to refer to drawings with sacred significance.4 Both mandala and yantra are sacred allegorical diagrams that represent the nature and order of the universe (see Figure 1.1). They are ‘map[s] of the cosmos…the whole universe in its essential plan’ (Tucci 2001:23). Tucci’s incisive description highlights three important attributes of mandalas and yantras. First, their primary referent is the cosmos but each represents it in a different graphic mode. Mandalas are generally composed of pictures and icons that depict religious concepts and deities who in turn personify the primary bodies and natural forces of the universe as well as the qualities of humans. Yantras are generally composed of purely geometric designs—squares, circles, triangles and the point—whose shapes likewise stand for religious concepts, deities and the natural forces and human qualities they personify. Second, mandalas and yantras are maps of the cosmos and, as such, the spatial arrangement of the pictures and geometric elements in the composition depict important characteristics of the cosmos. Third, more than just an allegorical map of the cosmos, mandalas and yantras are microcosms of it. Whether composed of pictographic or geometric elements, they are simultaneously cosmograms, religiograms, sociograms and psychograms revealing the normally hidden system of correlations between planes of existence: the cosmos, the deities, the human social world, and the body and psyche of the individual (Hopkins 1971:25, Tucci 2001:45). The macro-microcosmic equation is a central theme in Hindu [tantric] cosmology and ‘knowledge of such mystical connections leads to power in both Upanisadic and Tantric thought’ (Gourdriaan 1979:57-58) and is a basis for ritual action and its efficacy (see Daryn 2002: 164ff).
Figure 1.1 Two forms of the mandala
In Fernandez’ terms, both mandalas and yantras are metaphors, ‘commanding image[s]’ (Read 1951 in Fernandez 1986:204) that ‘bridge the abyss’ (Fernandez 1986:178) between all planes of existence and meaning, enabling experience and knowledge of the whole. Fernandez’ point is largely cognitive rather than practical: metaphors enable an intellectual understanding of the whole. Mandalas and yantras are more than this: they are instrumental and revelatory. Each can be used as a practical means of participating in the cosmos to harness its powers for worldly purposes to which humans become attached and each can be the focus for meditation and knowledge of the cosmos that leads to liberation from such attachment. In ritual action upon mandalas and yantras humans gain access to the powers of the cosmos through the system of correlations between planes of existence embedded in them; in understanding these correlations through contemplation, humans come to know the fundamental nature of the cosmic plane of existence.
In the literature, yantras are described more as instruments for action than for meditation, because the word ‘yantra’ literally means ‘instrument’ (Walker 1968 II:21, Kramrisch 1976, I:11, Hoens 1979:113, Khanna 1979:11) or ‘machine’ (Zimmer 1972:141, Bühnemann 2003:28). In Nepal this characterization of yantras only appears to be the case. For Kholagaun Chhetris among whom I have done fieldwork, yantra forms called ‘rekhi’ are diagrams composed of lines and geometric shapes drawn with coloured powder on the ground by household priests for a number of important rituals—particularly sacrifices performed in rites of passage and in rites of house consecration and inauguration. The geometric designs of these yantra mark out a sacred space and designated places where deities descend and are worshipped by people who seek their benefaction for worldly purposes. The performance of the worship rites involve physical actions of offerings and gestures to the deities in the yantra. A mandala, on the other hand, is an elaborate pictorial composition used in Nepal by Buddhists more as a visual guide for meditation that will lead to experience and knowledge of the ultimate transcendent truth of the cosmos. Yet, the distinction between instrumental action and revelatory meditation—as if meditation is not an embodied action—made in the literature may be false. Buddhist groups do use a mandala in ritual practice (e.g. Gellner 1992:190ff). Conversely, one of the themes I will develop throughout this book is that Kholagaun Chhetris’ action towards yantras—in their houses and in their ritual practices—is a non-contemplative form of embodied experience and knowledge that is also revelatory of the transcendent truth of the Universe. ‘A yantra … is a machine to stimulate inner visualization’ (Zimmer 1972:141). This can be done in bodily action upon the yantra just as much as in the bodily stillness of meditation upon its form. In their domestic and ritual activities, Kholagaun Chhetris’ bodily movements in relation to the yantra replicate the inward and outward movement of the eye and meditative mind in relation to mandalas. There is a more fundamental sense, then, in which mandala and yantra are indistinguishable in the ways they are used in Nepal. Both are an instrument of revelatory knowledge of the ultimate truth of the cosmos, the yantra through worldly-oriented, non-reflexive embodied action upon it and the mandala through inner-directed and highly reflexive but also embodied contemplation of it. We now turn to the truth that can be revealed through action and contemplation on mandalas and yantras.
Cosmology and Design of Mandala and Yantra
Even though they use different representational forms, pictographic mandalas and geometric yantras both express Tantric cosmological themes that infuse both Buddhism and Hinduism in Nepal. Tantrism is a ‘collection of practices and symbols of a ritualistic, sometimes magical character … [that] are all applied as a means of reaching spiritual emancipation or the realization of mundane aims’ (Goudriaan 1979:6).5 Hindu [tantric] cosmology is enigmatic and paradoxical. The fundamental reality it posits is an absolute unity that is a spaceless, timeless, causeless void. Juxtaposed to but derived from this ultimate cosmic unity is the ordered diversity of spaces, times, people, animals, natural forces, and material things of the everyday world that is ultimately an illusion. The origin of this worldly diversity is described in the self-sacrifice of the primeval cosmic being, Purusa. Purusha’s cosmogenic sacrifice is widely known in Nepal; in Kholagaun, people usually referred to the following lines from the Rig Veda ‘Hymn to Purusha’ (10:XC) when explaining to me the source and nature of the world:
The Brahmins from his [Purusha’s] mouth,
the Kshatriyas from his arms,
the Vaishyas from his stomach and
the Shudras from his feet.
The moon was born from his mind,
from his eyes was born the sun,
from his mouth [the deities] Indra and Agni, and
from his breath Vayu was born.
From his navel was the atmosphere,
from his head the sky was evolved,
from his feet the earth,
and the directions from his ear.
In this narrative, Purusha embodies the fundamental unity of the cosmos. All that can and will exist in the world is immanent in his body. His self-sacrifice is a creative act unleashing the diversity inherent and potential in his body and creating the microcosmic-macrocosmic system of correlations between planes of existence. As a result of this sacrifice, all perceptible time and space, every corporeal being and thing, and all natural energies and forces in the everyday world are both a distinct phenomenon and an expression of the whole unified cosmos. Every diverse being and thing is a visible and sensual microcosm that replicates but obscures the macrocosm.6 To focus on the former is to experience reality as constituted only by the diversity of sensible worldly phenomena; this is caused by ignorance which leads humans to become attached to people and things through social and material relations (see Gray 1995). To understand such attachments as the goal of life is to be caught in the continual cycle of death and rebirth (samsara). To focus on the latter—the macrocosm immanent in every thing—is to experience the everyday world of diversity as ultimately an illusion (maya) that hides the fundamental unity of the cosmos; this enlightened knowledge of the absolute leads humans to eschew the illusion of attachments. To understand the goal of life as ascetic detachment that dissolves the illusion of diversity leads to liberation (moksha) from the continual round of death and rebirth.
Despite their differences in representational form, mandalas and yantras share a basic design composition for expressing this cosmology: a centre point (bindhu) surrounded by a concentric girdle—either circular or polygonic—of line/s and space/s that provide the dynamic quality of movement, and an outer boundary line that marks off the sacred space of the mandala. This spatial configuration is constructed from primary geometric elements: the point, the square and the circle. The point and its central location in the diagram together are a spatial rendering of the fundamental unity and truth of the cosmos in its un-manifested form before and after space, time and the diversity of beings and things of the world. It is called Brahma. Like Purusha, all is immanent in it; it is the point from which the world in all its diversity is created and it is the point into which all creation dissolves. Movement outward from the bindhu that forms a surrounding space is the force of creation and evolution of worldly diversity and the entrapment of attachment to it; movement inward toward the bindhu is the force of dissolution and devolution of worldly diversity and liberation from its illusory power through knowledge of the fundamental unity of Brahma.
The square is the perfect four-cornered polygon with sides of equivalent length intersecting at right angles. In Hindu iconography, it is the geometric image of the space for terrestrial dwelling; it creates the spatial abode in the world for deities and humans. Its orienting references are the cardinal directions. The four sides and the cardinal directions—east, south, west and north—are mutually constitutive. In the process of creation from the centre, the cardinal directions and terrestrial space are the source of each other’s existence. Each side of the square faces a cardinal direction which is its originating cause. The four corners formed by the intersecting sides produce the intermediate directions—south-east, south-west, north-west and north-east. The eight directions are in turn associated with deities representing and reigning over particular aspects of the cosmos—they personify the cosmos manifest in the planets, natural forces, and human qualities.7 When based upon a four-sided polygon, a mandala in the generic sense is composed of five essential features: a centre and four sides or the four corners that demarcate the quadrangle. This gives it a basic design configuration consisting of a four-sided, four-corned polygon aligned with the cardinal directions and their reigning deities surrounding a centre. In this configuration, the emphasis is on the terrestrial world as a space of human habitation created and defined by the sacred geography of the cardinal directions and their reigning deities. In this configuration, as I suggest below, the mandala is a cosmological space for auspicious action in the world. The directions and their reigning deities have distinct qualities and meanings that organize terrestrial space into a template for orientating human action. People align their action in particular directions—either by physically performing it in a particular part of a structure or diagram or bodily facing a particular direction during action—so that the nature of the action is compatible with the quality or characteristic of the direction toward which it is aligned.
The circle defines another type of space, a concentric zone around the all-embracing centre point (bindhu) without reference to the cardinal directions. The concentric zones do not immediately suggest the expanse of terrestrial space of human living but the space created by and for the diversity of people and things. Its orienting reference, then, is the centre point ‘as the universe in its un-manifested form’ (Mookerjee and Khanna 1977:96), ‘as the principle from which all form and creation radiates’ (Bühnemann 2003:41). The zone/s marked out by concentric spaces around the bindhu depict simultaneously the outward, expanding, centrifugal act of creating from the centre point the diversity of things and beings, as well as the space for them, and the inward, contracting, centripetal act of their dissolution into the centre point. In this concentric configuration the mandala is a guide for understanding the cosmos, whether achieved by meditation or action upon its form. In sensual and embodied contemplation, as the eye fixes on the centre point and is drawn to move outward by the surrounding lines, the beholder experiences the un-manifested source, visualizes the creation of the diversity of people and things and feels the attachment to the world that traps humans in the round of death and rebirth. As the eye is pulled inward by the power of the bindhu at the centre, the beholder experiences the obliteration of diversity, discovers the illusion of attachment to it and comes to understand the true nature of the universe as fundamentally a timeless and spaceless unity in which all forms of individual consciousness merge in the centre, Brahma. As I describe in later chapters, in domestic and ritual activities Kholagaun Chhetris experience the same centripetal inward and centrifugal outward movement in relation to the house and in relation to sacred diagrams—jagya or rekhi—drawn in the form of yantras for sacrifices, rites of passage and house consecrations. In such action, Kholagaun Chhetris produce a non-meditative and practical hexis (Bourdieu 1977:93-94), a bodily incorporation of both the process of understanding the cosmos and the understanding itself.
Two Modes of Mandala Space
So far, my aim has been to argue that the overall similarities between mandala and yantra in terms of their nature, uses, meaning and reference to Hindu [tantric] cosmology provide a basis for using the term ‘mandala’ in a generic sense to mean: a mystic allegorical diagram composed of pictographic and geometric designs that is a microcosmic spatial representation of the cosmos, which people use as a means to harness the powers of the universe as well as to understand its hidden but fundamental unity. At the same time I have laid the groundwork for identifying two modes of cosmological space embedded in the mandala. One mode, which I call the ‘yantric’, is in the form of a four-sided polygon that encloses and thereby constitutes space itself; such space is substantively defined and organized by the cardinal directions, the deities that inhabit them and the realms of natural forces, worldly actions and human qualities they control. The other mode, which I call the ‘mandalic’, is concentric space organized relative to a centre-point of concentrated sacred energy and stillness. Surrounding the centre point are zone/s of increasingly mundane space and everyday activity through which humans produce and reproduce their individual attachments to the world and a boundary separating an inner space of ritual power, order and moral organization from an outer space of danger and disorder (Levy 1990:153, 158).
Figure 1.2 Two modes of domestic space
The two spatial modes that I have identified as co-existent in the mandala together express the enigma of the cosmology. The yantric mode with its emphasis on the cardinal directions and auspiciousness foregrounds the diversity of the world. Auspiciousness is about the timing and spatial positioning of events that lead to well-being and prosperity in the world and prosperity is an abundance of the diverse things of the world. The mandalic mode with its emphasis on the centre and concentric spaces surrounding it foregrounds the unity underlying that diversity and the path to understanding and release. In the later chapters I show how these two modes of mandala space exist as two ever-present possibilities—the one always immanent in the other—in the way Kholagaun Chhetris live and live in their domestic space. At some times and in some contexts, the yantric four-sided polygon is foregrounded in domestic activities and rituals with the mandalic concentric configuration existing as background (Chapter 2); at other times and in other contexts, the mandalic configuration is foregrounded in domestic activities and rituals with the yantric mode existing as background (Chapters 4 and 5). But first, I will turn to the Vastu Shastra and how it provides constructional guidelines for configuring a house as a mandala.
Vastu Shastra: Architectural Yantra
‘The vāstupuru amandala … is a yantra.’
Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple
The use of mandala spatiality in the construction of houses so that they are functional as well as microcosmic—places to carry out worldly life as well as to know the fundamental reality it obscures—is elaborately codified in the Hindu architectural texts, the Vastu Shastra, which set out a comprehensive architectural design and construction system for all built forms including individual residences, temples, neighbourhoods, villages and entire cities. It is part of a vast compilation of treaties on architecture and sculpture, the Shilpa Shastra, dating from Vedic time to the fifteenth century (see Chakrabarti 1999:2 and Sinha 1998:27-28). They cover all aspects—architectural and functional as well as sacred and ritual—of the building process: selection of an architect and the team of craftsmen builders, selection of the site, calculation of the auspicious time for the various phases of the building process, units of measurement to be used for construction, orientation of the site in relation to the cardinal directions in which various deities reside, design of the building or settlement and its surrounding area, choice of building material, stages of the construction process itself, and the rituals consecrating the site before construction and the completed building.8 The aim of the Vastu Shastra is to make built forms microcosms through a system of correlations between the universe immanent in the body of Purusha and the constituents of the universe personified by deities and the cardinal directions. These correlations are plotted onto a mandala whose spatial organization—and the Hindu [tantric] cosmology it represents—is used in the design of buildings.
Figure 1.3 Vastu purusha mandala
Cosmology and Vastu Design Principles
‘Creation of the world and its planning are twin sisters.’
D. N. Shukla, The Vastu Shastra
The Sanskrit word ‘vāstu” refers to the act of design or planning as well as to the built forms and the ‘dwelling space’ (Ananth 1998:5-6) that result from it. Like the originary creative act of Purusha’s self-sacrifice, the Vastu Shastra portrays the act of architectural design of built space as doubly constitutive of the everyday world: space itself is created in the bounding act of measurement; individual sites and buildings for human dwelling are brought into existence by the ordering of space in relation to the cardinal directions. Just as all existence is immanent in Purusha’s body and is made manifest through his cosmogenic sacrifice, so too in the Vastu Shastra, the diversity of architectural spaces are immanent in Purusha’s body and made manifest through a design methodology based upon it. The basic template for architectural design for all types of built forms is the vastu purusha mandala. It consists of a image of Purusha in the form of a human body enclosed in a square superimposed with a grid oriented by the cardinal directions (see Figure 1.3).
The modules or squares of the grid are the places for various deities. Depending upon the type of building being designed, the grid can be developed from a single square, in which the guardian deities of the four directions are associated with each side, upward by arithmetical progression to grids of 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, and 81 modules (Chakrabarti 1999: Figures 22-28e, 63-74). With each increase in the number of modules more deities are introduced. House design is normally based upon an 81 (9x9) grid in which the central nine modules are the location of Brahma, the word and the deity associated with the fundamental unity of the cosmos (see Figure 1.4). Around this central space are an inner zone of twelve deities and an outer zone of thirty-two deities. In the outer zone, eight of the deities are located in the centres of the four sides and in the four corners; they are guardian deities of the eight directions in terms of which space is defined; interspersed in the other modules are deities associated with the celestial bodies in terms of which time is defined and its passage measured.
Figure 1.4 Vastu purusha mandala with deities
Figure 1.5 Two spatial configurations of the vastu purusha mandala
Chakrabarti suggest that the mandala as a design template admits of two configurations that make it adaptable to regional variations in climate. These two variations are a grid pattern (Figure 1.5) for use in hot and dry areas, like Rajastan, in which the ‘vastu purusha mandala is perceived as a pattern of squares in which the central squares are ruled by Brahma’ (1999: 12) and a concentric pattern for use in wet and humid areas, like Kerala, in which the ‘vastu purusha mandala is perceived as a square that broadly consists of three concentric zones (Figure 1.6) around the central square’ (1999:13). This duality of the vastu purusha mandala for the design of living spaces in different climatic conditions reiterates my earlier abstraction of two spatial modes immanent in the mandala: a yantric polygon oriented by the cardinal directions and a concentric series of zones of inward and outward movement.
Yantric Configuration: Polygon and Sacred Geography
In the configuration as a yantric polygon, vastu design principles orient the room layout of a house and consequently the everyday domestic activities of people living in it in relation to a sacred geography. By this I mean that each of the eight geographical directions has its own meaning and identity based upon its presiding or guardian deity and realm of natural phenomena and human attributes over which it has control. In the Table 1.1 below, I set out some details of this sacred geography or ‘cosmology of place’ (Ananth 1998:81) as described in two major commentaries on the Vastu Shastra (Chakrabarti 1999:101-112, Ananth 1998:82-83).
The association of the body of Purusha with cardinal directions and deities (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4) provides a yantric design template of varying complexity for determining auspicious locations for the functional spaces for everyday domestic activities. The aim is to ensure that the nature and quality of activity carried out in the room is compatible with the attributes of the directions and the orientation of Purusha’s body in relation to them. Such a correlation between action on the human plane of existence and the cosmic plane of existence is conducive to realising beneficial consequences of well-being and prosperity.
Table 1.1 Sacred geography of the Vastu Shastra
Direction |
Presiding Deity |
Realm |
North |
Kubera |
Wealth, abode of the gods |
North-east |
Isan |
Purity, knowledge and wisdom |
East |
Indra |
The gods, direction where the sun rises |
South-east |
Agni |
Fire |
South |
Yama |
The Dead; direction of the ancestors |
South-west |
Narriti |
Misery; corner of ancestors |
West |
Varuna |
Water |
North-west |
Vayu |
Wind |
The following are some paraphrased excerpts from my fieldnotes of how Kholagaun Chhetris correlated some of the cardinal directions with the location of rooms and activities in a house:9
North: North is the direction of the Himalayas, ‘the abode of the gods’. The guardian deity of the north is Kubera, the god of wealth. As a result, the rooms or places for storing the wealth and treasures of the house are in the north.
North-east: The guardian deity of this direction is Isan, a form of Shiva, who is associated with purity, knowledge and wisdom. As a result it is appropriate for the worship room of a house to be in the north-east between the east—the realm of the gods—and the north—the abode of the gods. In doing puja to the gods one should be in a state of purity.
East: The guardian deity of the east is Indra. East is where the sun rises and is the realm of the gods. In making offerings to the deities, the worshipper faces east. It is the direction where the sun rises and thus an auspicious direction. In the morning, a person washes his/her face while facing the east so he/she sees the gods with a clean face. As a result, it is appropriate that the place for bathing is in the east.
South-east: The guardian deity of the south-east is Agni. Agni is the god of fire. Fire comes in many forms. The natural forms of fire include common fire made by rubbing stick together, lightning, the sun, human passion and digestion; the ritual forms of fire include the householder’s sacrificial fire that serves as the mouth of the gods and the funeral fire in which the body of a human is offered. It is the appropriate location for the kitchen and the hearth.
South: The guardian deity of the south is Yama, god of the dead. It is an inauspicious direction, and the direction faced for rituals and offerings to the ancestors. During times of pollution brought about by death in thr lineage, a person faces south while washing the face in the morning. Also, when a goat is sacrificed, it is made to face south. Placing a bedroom in the south, the head of the bed on the south wall means that when a person wakes, the first direction in which one will look is north, the abode of the gods.
Kholagaun Chhetris called these correlations between cardinal directions, rooms and activities ‘bastu’ rules. They reiterate the same concern as the Vastu Shastra with building an auspicious house in which humans may live in harmony with the cosmos by orienting their actions in domestic space so that they are compatible with the sacred geography of the directions and their reigning deities. Such spatial harmony is a condition of prosperity. In talking about prosperity, Kholagaun Chhetris used the word ‘samṛddhi’, which means prosperity in a holistic sense and includes abundance of those diverse worldly things and emotional states which Householders desire and to which they become attached: food and other forms of wealth produced from land, children produced in marriage and well-being and social harmony produced through the worship of deities.
There is a temporal dimension to achieving this harmony and prosperity in the use of astrology. While I found few villagers who consulted professional architects to design their houses, they did consult their household priests who interpreted the owner’s horoscope as the basis of any advice on the design and process of building. According to the Vastu Shastra, the horoscope of the owner or patron is used in calculating the auspicious proportions of buildings and rooms and the auspicious times and places for construction and consecration. A person’s horoscope is derived from the particular time and place where he or she was born. In this sense, the horoscope uniquely differentiates every person cosmically and socially because no two individuals are born in exactly the same time and in exactly the same place. As I will describe in more detail in Chapter 3, using the owner’s or patron’s horoscope to calculate the auspiciousness of a particular site, the specific timing of the building processes, and the various consecration rites makes the house harmonize with and become a projection of the owner’s cosmically-determined being. In this sense, the house as mandala is a representation of both the owner and the cosmos. It is situated between them as a ‘mesocosm’ (see Levy 1990) that mediates between the individual owner and the cosmos—another iteration of the house as a space for worldly action and divine experience. One of the effects of such astrological calculations in the design of houses is the identification of the house with the householder. ‘The house then becomes the body of Purusha … Also the householder identifies his own body with the body of Purusha as well as with the “body” of the house’ (Chakrabarti 1999:81).10
Mandalic Concentric Space and Knowledge of the Cosmos
The Vastu Shastra builds the enigma of the cosmos into architectural design. The building that results from the use of its principles are not only auspicious spaces for the production of worldly prosperity but also places engendering knowledge of the absolute unity of the cosmos that denies the reality of such prosperity. In this latter respect, a house is configured in the mandalic mode of space in which humans can live in the everyday world of diversity and in which they also can penetrate the illusion of the everyday world and experience the unity of the cosmos (see Ananth 1998:4).11 In the mandalic configuration, the domestic compound consists of a series of concentric zones emanating from a centre. In the Vastu Shastra, this centre is the space of stillness and lack of action that represents the unity of Brahma (see Figure 1.4); this central space is appropriately called the ‘brahmanstāna’, the space of Brahma.12 The surrounding spaces of the house are for human purposeful action in the everyday world of diversity. Domestic activities and movements by humans inward towards the centre are progress towards divine experience of the true reality of the fundamental unity of the cosmos. Movement outward from the centre is creative of the diversity of the everyday world and action through which humans form attachment to it. In Kholagaun Chhetris’ lifeworld, these cosmologically significant movements toward and away from the centre of the mandala are transposed in everyday life into a concern with the vulnerability of the centre of the house—the kitchen—to the impurity of lower-caste people, the curses of witches and the harm of disembodied ghosts.
Kholagaun Chhetris as Householders
Hindu [tantric] cosmology of fundamental unity and epiphenomenal worldly diversity, asceticism and attachment, religious knowledge (gyan) and illusion (maya), liberation (moksha) and entrapment in the cycle of rebirth (samsara), also permeates the lifeworlds of Kholagaun Chhetris in the Hindu notion of the four stages of life (āshrāma) through which high-caste people proceed. Together, they are cosmology iterated in the microcosmic form of human life-span.
The first stage is the Brahmacharya, the Life of the Celibate Student. This is the stage during adolescence when a young boy studies the religious texts under the guidance of a guru as a prelude to and a pre-condition for marriage and entering the Householder stage of life. During this phase the boy adopts asceticism as a mode of life and must remain celibate and beg for food. Most Chhetri boys go through the Brahmacharya stage only as part of the rite of passage in which they become adults. (For women, the rite of passage to adulthood and to the Householder stage of life is marriage.) The second stage is the Grihastha, the Life of the Householder. This is the stage in which Chhetris spend their adult lives; it includes marriage, raising children, living in a household and producing the material needs for its members. Three sacred duties are specified for the life of Householder in the world: begetting children, feeding the ascetics, and performing sacrifice. Each of these motivates Householders to a life characterized by passion, prosperity and attachment (see Gray 1995): the duty to beget children motivates an attachment to a diversity of people (epitomized by marriage and the love of children); the duty to feed the ascetics motivates attachment to a diversity of things in the world (epitomized by ownership of land to produce food for subsistence and to feed the ascetics); and the duty to perform sacrifice motivates attachment to a diversity of deities (epitomized by doing numerous pujas towards gods and goddesses). The third stage is the Vanaprasta, the Forest Dweller. This is the stage when, having discharged the duties of the Householder and passed the age of copulation, a man and his wife retire to the forest where they devote themselves to meditation and the practice of austerities including chastity. All of the previous stages are a preparation for the final and most radical renunciation demanded of the final stage of life, the Sanyasin, or wandering ascetic. During this stage of life, a person renounces all worldly desires, together with the social relations and attachments entailed by them.
All Kholagaun Chhetris consider themselves to be in the Householder stage of life. They told me that people rarely became Forest Dwellers; and they could not remember anyone from the village who had become a Forest Dweller or a Wandering Ascetic. In effect, for Chhetris, the four stages of life juxtapose two contrasting modes of being-in-the-world. One is the Householder, the ordinary person-in-the-world whose life is defined by actions (kaman) and the aim of such action is to produce ‘practical’ results (‘fruits’) in this world. It is this action in and for the world that produces the diversity of people and material things which are the objects of one’s attachments, desires and passions. But as a result of such worldly-oriented action and attachments, the Householder is caught in the continual round of birth-death-rebirth into the world. The other mode of being-in-the-world is the Renouncer, personified by the asceticism and detachment of the Brahmacharya, Vanaprasta and Sanyasin. The goal of such detachment is to achieve liberation from the round of birth-death-rebirth and to realize the fundamental unity of one’s self with all other selves and things.
While the Householder lives in and forms attachments to the diversity of people and objects in the everyday world, such attachments and the passions associated with them are a form of false consciousness. Chhetris in Kholagaun explicitly know the Hindu teachings that the everyday world of diverse people and objects is ultimately an illusion (maya) and that uncontrolled enjoyment of and desire for the diversity of things continues the illusion and traps people in the cycle of birth-death-rebirth on earth. Too great an attachment to these people and things prevents a person from experiencing the ultimate timeless and spaceless unity that is the true nature of the cosmos—diversity is an illusion.
In this respect, the Householder’s world is another plane of existence in the system of correlations with the cosmos. As Householders, Kholagaun Chhetris live in a world characterized by the paradox that the mandala spatially expresses and their houses architecturally re-iterate. On the one hand, they must become attached to people and things in order to carry out their dharma as Householders. On the other hand, they should not deem this diversity of people and things and their attachment to them as the truth of the cosmos. The householder way-of-life is characterized by a tension between asceticism and passion or by detached attachment and passionless passion.
Conclusion
My aim in this chapter has been to demonstrate how the mandala form, the house and the life of the Chhetri Householder in Nepal are each iterations of a cosmology and to describe the correlations between these different forms of representing it. Each form of representation uses a different register—pictorial and geometric designs, architectural spaces, and stages of life—to express the nature and paradox of the cosmos: its esoteric juxtaposition of fundamental unity and worldly diversity, ascetic detachment and passionate attachment, knowledge and illusion, destruction and creation, liberation and rebirth. Such redundancy of representation is inherent in the macrocosm-microcosm equation so that each plane of existence is understood as a parallel order of reality; each provides a possible path to knowledge and liberation. To understand the meaning of one of these planes of existence—mandala, house, stage-of-life—is to understand the enigma of the cosmos which in turn informs the understanding of other planes of existence in which the same enigma exists.
What I am portending here is my task for the following chapters: to show how Kholagaun Chhetris of Nepal live a cosmology through domestic activities and rituals that both create and are organized by the domestic mandala. Their embodied familiarity with these sacred themes as an integral part of their lifeworld is as much a product as a cause of the design of their houses and the way it spatially organizes their everyday activities. In this duality I am reminded of how Geertz describes the effects of cockfighting as text upon Balinese subjectivity (1975:448-451). Mindful of the problems associated with the static nature of texts for capturing the dynamism of social life, I closely paraphrase some of the concluding section of Geertz’s article substituting, as appropriate to the Chhetris of Nepal, the houses they live in and the cosmology they form and discover by living in their houses.
Enacted and re-enacted, so far without end, the house as mandala enables Kholagaun Chhetris to see a dimension of their own subjectivity. As they live in their houses day after day, with the active living of a Householder producing prosperity, they grow familiar with it and what it has to say to them, much as an attentive listener to string quartets or the absorbed viewer of still lifes grows slowly more familiar with them in a way which opens his subjectivity to himself.
Yet, because … that subjectivity does not properly exist until it is thus organized, the house as mandala generates and regenerates the very subjectivity it pretends only to display. Quartets, still lifes and houses are not merely reflections of a pre-existing sensibility allegorically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility.
Notes
1 See Barre et al. 1981 for the Newar house as mandala; Gutchow and Kolver 1975 for the Newar city of Bhakapur as mandala, Gutchow and Bajracharya 1977 for the city of Kathmandu as a mandala, Slusser 1982 for the Kathmandu Valley as mandala, Shephard for the ‘mandalization’ (1985:72) of the Kathmandu Valley, the mandala form in which cites, temples and houses were architecturally conceived.
2 In Slusser, the pilgramage is called Chār Nārāyan Jātra, ‘the pilgrimage of the four Nārāyans’ (1982:256).
3 Bühnemann (2003) and Brunner (2003) provide discussions of the differences between mandalas and yantras based upon analysis of Hindu textual sources. Bühnemann concludes: ‘The use and functions of these terms [mandala, yantra and cakra] are complex and it will be impossible to arrive at a universally valid definition’ (2003:18).
4 As we will see shortly, in Nepal ‘mandala’ tends to refer to mystic diagrams associated with the Buddhism of Newars and Tibetan groups and ‘yantra’ with the Hinduism of Brahmin-Chhetris. At the same time, it should not be concluded that ‘mandalas are rarely part of the Hindu tradition and than yantras are not found in the Buddhist tradition’ (Bühnemann 2003:16). See Gellner’s description of the importance of mandalas among both Buddhist and Hindu Newars of Patan (1992:45-48,190-191).
5 Note here the continuing theme of the duality of the use of tantric paraphernalia towards the realization of worldly aims as well as revelation of ultimate truth.
6 See Ollman’s (1976:26–40) discussion of the philosophy of inner relations.
7 These essential features of the square—a four-sided polygon implicating and oriented by the four cardinal and four intermediate directions—are retained in the rectangle which we will see is the basic geometric configuration of a house.
8 Shephard points out that there is documentary evidence that the Vastu Shastra was used by Newar builders in the past (1985:92) and that they continue to use them in the design formula in current building (1985:98–99).
9 These five directions—North, North-east, East, South-east and South—were the ones which most Kholagaun Chhetris were able to describe in relation to deities and/or qualities. Many of them indicated that they did not know anything about the other three, South-west, West and North-west.
10 In the Vastu Shastra, there are two forms of detailed instructions for determining the specific proportions of length to width of the site, dimensions of the house, its constituent parts and the location of rooms, and types of building materials. The first of these are known as the ayadi formulae. They consists of astrological calculations for assessing whether the specific qualities of a house’s planned orientation and dimensions (measured in terms of hasta or forearm) are in harmony with the individual horoscope of the owner. The area of the plot is subjected to mathematical operations to determine its astrological qualities and potential for income or benefit (aya), for expenses or loss (vyaya), the most auspicious orientation for the binding (grihabandham) and life forces (praana) of the building (yoni), the characteristics of the house (amsha), and the most auspicious day for beginning construction (vāram) (Ananth 1998:155ff. Chakrabarti 1999:51ff). The second of these is the vastu purusha mandala. The potential design complexity of this mandala can be varied through an arithmetical progression of 1, 4, 9, 16 modules, and so on. Each of these modules is invested with meaning by being associated with a direction and a deity. There is a basic structure to all these forms: a central square always associated with Brahma, the deity representing the ultimate and profound unity of the cosmos surrounded by rings of modules associated with deities representing separate aspects and phenomena of the material world of human existence through the cosmology of directions and parts of the body. The vastu purusha mandala used for all houses consists of eighty-one modules (Chakrabarti 1999:64), with twelve inner deities surrounding the central module of Brahman and 32 outer deities arranged along the boundary modules of the mandala (Chakrabarti 1999:64ff). This is a much more complex design system than the general principles of the orientation of rooms based on sacred geography and the concentricity of the house described in the previous section. It can be used by architects to develop intricate layouts for doors, windows, rooms and the resultant the organization of everyday activities.
11 Here we directly see the duality of the mandala space. Like other mandalas, the vastu purusha mandala incorporates three distinct spatial principles for the layout of rooms and activities in a house: (1) ‘a boundary and its contained area within which “ritual” power and order is held and concentrated’ (Levy 1990:153); (2) a grid that implicates the cardinal directions, the deities and realms of sacred powers associated with each; and (3) a concentric configuration of zones around a centre point.
12 Chakrabarti’s interpretation of the Vastu Shastra assumes that the centre space is an open courtyard but this is based upon the hot climatic conditions of India. In the Kathmandu Valley with its cooler climate, the central space of Kholagaun Chhetris traditional houses is the stairway to the upper floors; it is usually located in the central area of the open plan of the first floor; above the stairway is an opening in the roof to allow the smoke from the kitchen fire to exit, making a continuous column of open space. In their modern houses the central space is the hallway that is vacant in the sense that there are no particular activities associated with it. More detailed definitions and descriptions of the interior layout of Kholagaun Chhetri traditional and modern houses will be presented in Chapter 2.
