Changu Narayan Temple

The tradition of Changu Narayan tells that the hill of Changu, or Dolagiri, was long ago covered with the sacred Champak forest, and that a Gwala, a cowherd, once kept his cattle there. He had bought a marvellous cow from a Brahmin, a cow that gave abundant milk, but each day when he brought her home she yielded almost nothing. Watching, the cowherd and the Brahmin saw the cow go each day to a certain tree and let down her milk at its root, where a small dark boy came and drank it.

Believing the tree to be haunted by a demon, the Brahmin struck it with his axe, and blood flowed from the trunk. In terror they cut deeper, and there, within the tree, was Vishnu himself, wounded by the blow. From the tree the lord revealed that he had been dwelling there in the forest, and that the cowherd's father, a hermit, had unknowingly cut off the head of the god through the falling of the tree, a sin from which Vishnu now released him, for the lord took the sin upon himself and granted the hermit liberation. So Vishnu came to be worshipped upon the hill as Changu Narayan, the lord of the Champak forest.

The god is worshipped here above all as Garuda Narayan, Vishnu with his great eagle-mount Garuda, and as Hari, the preserver. The kneeling stone Garuda in the courtyard, its hands folded before the lord, is the constant companion of the shrine, and the sculptures ranged around it, Vishnu striding the three worlds, Vishnu tearing the demon as Narasimha, Vishnu shown in his universal form, unfold the deeds of the preserver whom Changu Narayan embodies. The tradition holds the hill to have been a seat of Vishnu from the deepest antiquity, so that Changu Narayan is honoured as the oldest of the temples of the valley.

Changu Narayan is regarded as the oldest temple of Nepal, a Vishnu shrine on the Changu or Dolagiri hill in the eastern Kathmandu Valley, above the Manohara river, a short distance from Bhaktapur. Tradition traces the sanctity of the hill to a time before memory, when the Champak forest covered it and Vishnu, worshipped here as Changu Narayan and Garuda Narayan, revealed himself in the forest to a cowherd and a Brahmin.

The documented history of the temple begins in the Lichhavi period, the classical age of the valley. In the temple courtyard stands the stone pillar of King Manadeva, raised in the fifth century of the common era and bearing the oldest known inscription of Nepal, an invocation of Vishnu and a record of the king that opens the written history of the country. Around the shrine are the early stone sculptures for which Changu Narayan is celebrated, the Vishvarupa, the Trivikrama, the Narasimha, the Vishnu on Garuda and the kneeling Garuda, works of the first age of Nepali art.

The shrine has been built and rebuilt across the centuries in the Newar pagoda idiom, for it has suffered fire and the earthquakes that have repeatedly shaken the valley. It was restored after a fire in the seventeenth century, and again after the great earthquakes of 1934 and of 2015, so that the two-tiered temple that stands today carries within it the labour of many generations of Newar craftsmen, its gilded doorway, torana and struts renewed while the ancient sculptures and the pillar endure in the courtyard.

Below the hill lies the Newar town of Changu, a living craft-village whose people have kept the temple and its worship through the ages. As part of the Kathmandu Valley, Changu Narayan is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, honoured both for its antiquity and for the beauty of its sculpture. It remains a living Vishnu shrine, drawing devotees to Changu Narayan and visitors to one of the great monuments of Nepal, a place where the recorded history of the country and the worship of the preserver are gathered upon a single wooded hill.