Budhanilkantha Temple

At the foot of Shivapuri Hill, on the northern rim of the Kathmandu Valley, a stone figure of Vishnu lies on its back in a rectangular pool of water, as though asleep on the cosmic ocean. Carved from a single block of black stone and about five metres long, it is held to be the largest stone sculpture in Nepal. There is no roofed shrine around it: Budhanilkantha is an open-air temple, and the god rests under the sky in a tank roughly thirteen metres long.

The four hands of the image hold Vishnu's attributes: the discus, a club, a conch and a gem. A crown carved with kirtimukha faces sits on his head, often partly covered by a silver crown during worship. The sculpture is believed to be well over a thousand years old. Its name means "Old Blue Throat", an epithet that properly belongs to Shiva, who turned blue after swallowing poison to save the world. Local tradition explains the paradox through water: the spring feeding the pool is said to be connected to the sacred lake of Gosaikunda in the high Himalaya, linked in Hindu myth to Shiva and the churning of the ocean. Another legend holds that a mirror image of Shiva can be seen beside the reclining figure in the water.

Stories of the statue's discovery vary. One tells of farmers whose plough struck stone and who dug out the buried god; another, of a king led in a dream to uncover the image, who chipped its nose with his spade. A further tradition says that King Pratap Malla, in the 17th century, saw in a vision that a reigning monarch who visited Budhanilkantha would die, and Nepal's kings afterwards stayed away. The temple is sacred to Hindus and also honoured by Buddhists, and it draws large crowds of pilgrims at the Haribodhini Ekadashi festival in the month of Kartik (October–November), when Vishnu is ritually woken from his four-month sleep.

Getting there

Budhanilkantha lies about 9 km north of central Kathmandu. Tribhuvan International Airport (KTM) is about 9 km away in a straight line.