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TODDT. LEWISNEPAL, BUDDHIST ART IN. SeeHimalayas, Bud-
dhist Art in
NEWARI, BUDDHIST LITERATURE IN
Beginning with Sanskrit inscriptions dating from the
fifth century C.E., the large mid-montane Himalayan
valley called Nepal has been a vibrant cultural center
where both Hindu and Buddhist traditions have flour-
ished. What is called “Nepal” today was formed after
1769 when the modern Shah state expanded across the
region, conquering the valley city-states and making
Kathmandu its capital. The first cities and religious
monuments of this valley were built by the Newars, the
earliest attested ethnic group of the region. Newars
speak a nontonal Tibeto-Burman language called
Newariin the Euro-American world, but referred to
by Newars as Nepal Bhasa,using Sanskritic terminol-
ogy, or Newa: Bhayin the spoken vernacular. This lan-
guage has been thoroughly influenced by Sanskrit
vocabulary, especially in the technical terms imported
from the Indic traditions that shaped Newar culture.
Newari texts have similarly been written using north
Indian-derived scripts, the earliest on palm leaves (tara
patra), and from the seventeenth century onward on
paper made from the daphne plant. In the latter form,
the texts were written on stacked rectangular pages, or
in the format of a folded book (thyasaphu). Many such
books were illustrated with finely rendered miniature
paintings, some with fifty to one hundred images.
Since this valley was from its origins a Himalayan
trade and pilgrimage center, and later a refuge for Bud-
dhist monks fleeing the destruction of north Indian
monasteries in the wake of the Muslim conquests that
ended in 1192 C.E., many monasteries in Kathmandu,
Bhaktapur, and Patan became centers of manuscript
veneration, archiving, and copying. From this era on-
ward, Tibetan scholars visited Nepal to obtain San-
skrit manuscripts and, in some cases, to confer with
Nepalese panditas.There have been many Newar Bud-
dhist scholars—especially among the “householder
monk” groups calling themselves s ́akyabhiksusand
vajracaryas—who could read and utilize Sanskrit,
making it an important local language for the indige-
nous Buddhist elite. Some notable panditasup through
the modern era also composed works in Sanskrit.
The vast holdings of Sanskrit manuscripts in the
Kathmandu Valley have remained central to the mod-
ern academic study of Buddhism, beginning with the
texts sent to Calcutta and Europe by the official British
resident in Nepal from 1825 to 1843, Brian Hodgson.
Many ancient Sanskrit texts survived only in Nepal.
Though one might include these works as a literature
used by the Newar Buddhist religious elite and other
literati, the remainder of this entry focuses on the re-
ligious texts composed in the Newari vernacular.
The Newar san ̇gha’s widespread familiarity with
Sanskrit, and especially the use of Sanskrit mantras and
religious terminology, explains the existence of the
many hundreds of manuscripts rendered in a bilingualNEPAL, BUDDHISTART IN