THE UNIQUE FEATURES OF NEWAR BUDDHISMThe key seems to lie in the two words sarrzsiirik: having families and being
busy with things of this world, and tantric: there are no Vajracaryas in bahls.
The fact that in later days the members of the bahls were indeed married is irrel-
evant; they were the guardians of a celibate tradition, a different tradition.^62 The
absence of Vajracaryas does not mean that the bahls were non-tantric. Every
bah/ has its tantric shrine (iigam) and the rituals they perform are basically
tantric. The point is that they were independent from the biihiis whose members
were by definition householders and from Vajracaryas who were priests to such
families, and whose biihiis had a much more elaborate and structured ritual
adapted to a householder tradition.
From the viewpoint of the biihiis this has a different meaning. Several years
ago one informant gave me the following explanation of bahls:
"In the days when all of these communities were open to any qualified
candidate the bahls were a lower class of vihiira, where the bhilcyu
would receive his first training. After completing his training he would
become an upasampradaya-bhilcyu and join a biihii, where he would
study further and receive further training, which would eventually
entitle him to become a Vajracarya."This is the view of a Sakya attached to one of the principal biihiis and expresses
quite accurately the view of the dominant biihii community who consider the
tantric traditions of the Vajracaryas to be a higher form of Buddhism. It may
also reflect the reality. The bahls may well have housed the last communities of
celibate monks (true brahmacarya-bhi/cyus) who had the leisure to pursue a
study of the dharma. Their vihiiras may well have been schools of the dharma
where Buddhists from the biihiis could go to learn the basics of the dharma.
This line of reasoning, however, overlooks another explanation for the devel-
opment ofNewar Buddhism which is found in the later chronicles and is known
to many people today. According to this tradition, Sailkaracarya came to Nepal,
defeated the Buddhists, destroyed their manuscripts, killed many of the monks
and forced the remaining monks to marry.^63 This is the source of a general
theory upheld by some foreign and many Nepali writers that an abrupt change
took place when nearly all the monks and nuns suddenly married and abandoned
the traditional celibate life style of the bhi/cyu.
There is no contemporary evidence for a visit by Sailkaracarya to Nepal from
either Indian or Nepalese sources. He would have come to Nepal at the height of
Licchavi power, but there is no evidence from the Licchavi inscriptions of such
a visit and no evidence of a religious upheaval resulting in the virtual destruction
of the Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, there is no evidence of either a visit by
Sailkaracarya, or a concerted effort to destroy Buddhism in the earliest and most
reliable chronicle, the Gopiilariijavarrzsiivali. To expect such an event at this
time does not fit what evidence we have of the history of Buddhism in Nepal.
From the evidence, it is clear that the greatest flowering of Buddhism in the