The Belief

The Kumbheshwar Temple in Patan — a rare five-storey pagoda, and one of the oldest standing structures in the Valley — has a sacred tank in its courtyard. The water in it is held to come underground from Gosaikunda, the high alpine lake sacred to Shiva at around 4,380 metres in the Langtang range. A jar of water is brought down from the lake and added to the tank for the festival.

Why That Matters

Gosaikunda is a genuinely hard pilgrimage: multi-day, high-altitude, seasonal, and beyond the reach of the old, the unwell, the poor and the busy. The belief about Kumbheshwar's water makes the merit of that pilgrimage available in the middle of a city to anyone who can walk to Patan. This is a substitution performed openly and without embarrassment — the festival's most practical piece of theology, and the reason the courtyard is packed from before dawn.

The Crowd

Thousands come to bathe in and around the tank, to receive the doro, and to make offerings. The courtyard is dense, wet and slow-moving for most of the day, and the surrounding lanes are full of stalls. It is one of the Valley's great crowd scenes and not a place to bring anything you mind losing.

The Sadhus

Sadhus gather at Kumbheshwar in numbers matched at few other Valley festivals outside Shivaratri — ash-smeared, dreadlocked renunciants, some resident in Nepal and some travelling from India for the day. They sit around the tank and the temple platforms receiving visitors and offerings. Photographing them is often invited and then charged for; agree on that before the picture rather than after.

Those Who Do Go

Pilgrims do still make the walk to Gosaikunda itself for the full moon, and the lake shore at that altitude on that night is a different festival entirely — cold, thin-aired, and far smaller.