Art and Religion in Nepal
by Lydia Aran

Nepali art is a religious art. Its main purpose is not aesthetic but inspirational. The image is a.mean to realization of a certain state of consciousness and is not intended to be either a representation of reality or a pleasurable decoration. 

Consequently, the Nepali artist does not endeavor to emulate the external world or to be true to nature. He paints or sculpts not what he perceives with his senses but a pictorial metaphor of forces struggling within ourselves. He is basically communicating a message, or, rather, translating a message inherent in a certain philosophy or conception of universe into a stereotyped iconographic idiom. He thus helps people to relate to transcendental forces by having these forces represented in expressive form real enough to enable even the simplest people to relate to them, yet sufficiently bizarre to indicate super-human powers and to command reverence. 

Nepali religions are highly syncretistic. Their polytheism is a mean to accommodate a great variety of beliefs and cults, all acceptable as ways leading to God, meaning both perfection of consciousness and protection. Their cults, beliefs and philosophies, which have evolved over thousands of years as expression of needs, interests and conditions of men, are never dogmatic or limited to a single doctrine. The boundaries between them are never clearly demarcated, allowing for pluralistic faiths, eclectic cults and rituals, mutual borrowing and idiosyncratic preferences in manning personal and local pantheons. It is therefore no use to approach the Hindu and Buddhist cultures in general, and their Himalayan variant in particular with the expectation of finding philosophical and religious creeds, communal or personal rituals, various forms of creative expression, and identities of deities and other symbols, neatly compartmentalized and labeled. The two religions and their various schools have existed next to each other for ages, and, being tolerant and non-exclusive, have competed with one another not by mutual suppression or destruction but by mutual accommodation and assimilation. The decisive actors in determining the religious scene have always been the believers - the simple lay people who kept adopting each other's gods, symbols, and rituals - simply , because they believed. in them, and let the scholars rationalize the adoption by endowing the new1y acquired deities with suitable functions and meanings to make them fit into, the existing pantheons.. However unsatisfactory this trend might have been for the guardians of the orthodox Buddhist and Hindu doctrines, it was extremely popular with the great majority of the Nepali people, who have incorporated these heterodox beliefs in their worship routines and preserved them in folklore and art. Many icons combining symbols of different religions and cults can be found in the Kathmandu Valley, bearing evidence to this tendency. In fact, the most popular deity of the Valley, the Lord of the World, Lokesvara, is a combination of the Buddhist Lord of Compassion, Avalokitesvara, with the major Hindu god, Shiva.

We cannot expect to "'understand" the Hindu or the Buddhist religions on a superficial acquaintance not only because both have profound philosophies which must be properly studied to be understood, but above all because, due to their nature, these religions do not lend themselves to understanding in purely intellectual terms and have to be lived. or experienced mentally, emotionally and physically in order to give an idea of their meaning and message. However, we certainly can enjoy and appreciate the Hindu Buddhist art and folklore if only we take the trouble to learn the basic things about their cultural milieu, and, above all, if we can temporarily switch off our Western conditioning with its watertight division into the sacred and the profane, its consequent segregation of art, religious worship and the mundane aspects of living, and its insistence on austerity in religious expression. None of these conventions are valid in the local cultural-social context. It is important, moreover, to realize that much of the surviving medieval and early modern art of Nepal was created. under the inspiration of Tantra, an esoteric mystic religious trend, whose language in literature and plastic art was deliberately obscure to keep its secret doctrine from the uninitiated. It was therefore articulated in a code, in which every smallest iconographic sign, prescribed in detail in the Tantric scriptures, carried a hidden meaning, the key to which was held by the initiated alone.

On the other hand, the strange forms of the tantric deities crowding the temples, shrines and paintings, were - and to a great extent - still are in the eyes of the majority of the people, portraits of superior but real beings on whose grace depends their fate, and who are to be supplicated for favor and protection. They have been given the bizarre and deliberately absurd forms to express their superhuman nature and their superior power, which they can use to protect their devotees from evil, but also to, punish them for wrong-doing. We must remember, therefore, that the gaudy eccentricity and the often weird extravaganzas of the objects of popular cult are not an indication of ignorance or ineptitude, but a deliberate appeal to imagination, which - on all levels - plays a very important part in the Himalayan religious practice. It might be relevant to mention in this context that some Hindu scriptures describe 'God as "kavi", a term which also means a poet.