Reflections on the Human-Divine Nexus in Nepal
We are excited to share the following field report from Alex Greene discussing his experiences conducting fieldwork in western Nepal.
On the way back down the mountain, Bikram picked up three stones and gave one to each of us. He told us that we should place them together as a remembrance of this meeting and our time together. He chose an insignificant place between a small tree and the concrete path, unobtrusive, out of sight. We set down our stones together, not stacked like a cairn but simply leaning on each other, paused for a moment, and walked away.
Through this simple act, guided by the instinct of our 16-year old guide, we left a memory embedded in the landscape. During the two months I spent in a small community in far western Nepal, I learned that landscape can be far more than a view, a place to gather resources and a setting for daily life. It can be the repository of memory, and the nexus where the human and the divine meet.
The reason for my visit to Malikarjun Rural Municipality was to conduct fieldwork as part of a Masters research project. Living in this remote place, I entered an unfamiliar world, one with deep connections between the environment and the customs and beliefs of the people. Locally, Malikarjun refers to three things: a god, the mountain where the god dwells, and the community that worships him. I understand this to be yet another expression of a universal truth, one captured beautifully in the Buddhist concept of the Three Jewels: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Every spiritual tradition needs a teacher, a teaching and a community. In Malikarjun, they are so connected that separate words do not exist, but the relationships are clear: Malikarjun the god is the teacher, Malikarjun the mountain is the teaching, and Malikarjun the community is composed of those who practice together.
Let me tell you the story of how Malikarjun first came to Malikarjun. A long time ago, in the days when Muslim rulers were sweeping across north India and often persecuting the Hindu communities they encountered, the descendants of Malikarjun fled north and east. They moved toward the mountains, where they hoped the inaccessible terrain would protect them, and as they fled, they carried their god. Malikarjun was bound to a shaligram, a sacred ammonite from the river Gandaki, and he traveled in a basket on the back of Averaj Pandi. After a long journey, the people entered the mid-hills of modern Nepal, just across the river Mahakali. They found a good place to settle and built homes and terraced fields.
A few years later, Averaj had a dream. Malikarjun spoke to him, explaining that the people had fallen into impurity, raising chickens, ploughing with bulls and engaging in filthy acts. Averaj was told that he would be sent a tiger in the dream and shown what to do. The tiger appeared, and Averaj took a thorn of nigalo, a local bamboo, and pierced the tiger under a nail on its left paw. This allowed him to mount on its back, and the tiger brought him across the landscape and up to the top of a mountain, to a small cave. Averaj understood that Malikarjun had found a new home. The next morning, as he woke, Averaj watched the shaligram of his god levitate off its altar and fly out of the house, across the hills and toward the top of the distant mountain. He gathered the people and explained what had happened, and what they must do. Together they left their homes and moved again, this time to the base of the mountain. They constructed a temple to Malikarjun and built new houses and fields. From now on, the god lived no longer in their midst, but he was never far away, overlooking them from his place on the mountain.
The mountain is a sacred place, a zone of purity where no one may pass. The forest blanketing the mountain receives the same reverence. Twice a year, the people prepare themselves, fasting and bathing for weeks, avoiding impurities like alcohol, meat and onions. Then together they hike to the top of the mountain and visit Malikarjun in his cave, venerating the shaligram and other sacred objects it contains.
Like the mountain itself, other features of the landscape are understood through the lens of divine manifestation. Certain springs and streams are bathing places of Malikarjun’s wives. The giant boulders are his horses, turned to stone. The trees on the mountainside bent up in fear at the passing of his great enemy Chiplo. Everywhere you turn, the landscape is alive, and meaning is vested in it. A few weeks into my stay, I learned that I had made an embarrassing mistake by choosing the wrong direction to sleep on my bed, so that my feet rather than my head faced the holy mountain. No one from the community would be capable of making this mistake, conscious as they are at each moment of where their feet stand in the matrix of purity that imbues their land with meaning.
As an outsider, the role I played was often that of the clown, the one to be stared at and stumble into funny situations. There was the time I misunderstood a friend and lit a hash cigarette a few feet away from a powerful local politician. There was the time I entered a shrine with shoes on, or when I entered a temple without having bathed that morning, or the other time I entered the circle of a sacred tree with shoes on. In fact, and contrary to the way we are often raised, making mistakes proved to be one of the best ways of learning. My friends and guides were never really angry, and they were quick to explain what had gone wrong and why. As a guest, I was always forgiven, and slowly I entered into their world. Each day we would sit down to mounds of rice and dhal and eat it carefully with our right hands. The time I was caught tearing my roti by holding it down with the left hand was an excellent opportunity to learn about purity and handedness (left hands are used to….clean yourself at the privy). Each night after dinner we would sit by candlelight and share a cigarette, going over the plans for the following day. The time I crudely ashed a cigarette into the sacred fire kept by the local sadhu was an opportunity to learn that not all ashes are the same: some are pure and are used for special purposes.
The hospitality of the people was incredible; everywhere we went they offered me food, water, milk or chunks of homemade sugarcane sugar. I was often told, “For Hindus, visitor is the god. You are visitor; to us you are the god.” And so my presence in town took on a strange tone. As the first foreigner to live in this community, I did many inexplicable things, often acting like a child. And yet at the same time, my status as a guest demanded respect, as an emissary of the divine, or an American with friends in high places. After weeks, we became accustomed to each other. The children still stared, but not quite as long. I learned who was who and how to greet them. We settled into a certain rhythm, the cultivation of a shared space.
I began to learn more about the wisdom tradition of the community. Initially, it appeared to be a masculine tradition of male gods, males priests and male shamans worshiping at stone lingas that represented the penis of Shiva. But during one revealing interview, the old man speaking to us turned to his wife and mother and said, “Why don’t you tell them? You know the story better than I do.” They declined, but this innocent comment opened up a new world. I learned that the stories I had heard, and the myth of Malikarjun I have just related, are abbreviated, prosaic versions of a rich oral literature, a series of sacred epics sung exclusively by the elder women of the community. During festivals, they gather together and sing for hours, for days, recounting the legends of the people, the gods and the land. We began requesting women to sing these stories to us and recording them when they allowed. In return, I sung back, exchanging for their knowledge the ‘traditional songs of my people.’ Hymns, folk songs, pop hits, Hebrew prayers I learned as a child – anything that came to mind. They loved it, loved learning that all people have traditions, that they could hear the meaning of the songs in my voice even without knowing the words.
Anthropology does not pretend to be a work of extraction, a distillation of knowledge that somehow ignores the presence of the one who distills. During my time in Malikarjun, this was clear: every interaction, every moment of participant observation, actively engaged me. My presence changed the world, and I learned to stop trying to prevent it. In the end, the beauty of my experience was that it was an exchange. Our work of sharing space and meaning enriched all of our lives, in ways we may never fully understand. The children picked kaphal fruit from the trees, and we ate them together.
Two months is a short time, a blink in the eyes of a generation. I will never understand Malikarjun from their perspective, and they will never understand it from mine. But for a time, in a remarkable meeting of lives, we coexisted, and together we tried. Even as I write, I can feel the presence of that sacred mountain on the edge of the horizon, looming above the trees. Will I ever come back? Time will tell. But for now, I am grateful for having a small taste of Malikarjun.
About the Author
Alex Greene is a field biologist, anthropologist and environmental educator. His focal interests are in ethnobotany, ornithology, entomology, mycology, traditional knowledge, oral literature, ethnomusicology, linguisticsand comparative religion. More recently, Alex has been conducting research on Karen traditions of herbal medicine for elephant care in northern Thailand.
