The Circuit

The route is a rule, not a suggestion

Matya's route is prescribed by tradition and it is total. The walker is meant to pass every Buddhist shrine in Patan — not the important ones, not a representative selection, all of them. The traditional reckoning is around 1,400 shrines: bahal courtyards, roadside stupas, carved stone chaityas set into wall niches, and the private votive shrines that sit in family courtyards behind doors that are shut the other 364 days of the year. The smaller counts you will see quoted — a hundred or so, sometimes 130 — are the major stupas and bahal courtyards, which is a different and much shorter list.

The four Ashoka stupas

The circuit hangs on four grassed mounds that mark the old limits of the city: Pulchowk, Lagankhel, Teta and Ibahi. Local tradition attributes them to the emperor Ashoka, and whatever their actual date they are the oldest religious structures in Lalitpur and the reason Patan's Buddhist geography has the shape it does. Walking Matya is, at the largest scale, walking the square they describe — and everything inside it.

What it costs

Many walkers go barefoot and fasting, from first light until the last shrine. There is no shortcut and no vehicle stage. In August, in monsoon, on stone. That is the point: the merit is in the distance, and the distance is the offering.

Joining a section

A visitor almost never walks the whole thing and does not need to. The procession is continuous, so you can pick it up in any lane of the old city and follow it for as long as you like — the character of the day is the same at hour two and hour ten, and only the light changes. What you get from an hour of it that you cannot get any other way is the interior of Patan: courtyards standing open, images uncovered, lanes you would never have a reason to turn down.