It’s a Bloody Mess! Newar Buddhist Sacrifice in Nepal

Sacrifice is a messy subject. An ethnographer wakes up early to witness a ritual. They wake up late and, unfortunately, miss the perceived main event. All that is left is a bloody mess, complete with dogs chomping away on the sacrificial meat and all sorts of ritual substances everywhere. It is seemingly disgusting and shocking to some. The priest is now gone, and the ritual assistants are slowly packing up the ritual items in their appropriate places. The Newar Buddhist ritual known as chāhāyekegu, a Buddhist sacrifice (skt. bali), without the shedding of blood at the temple, is performed by Buddhist priests in front of the temple of the former demoness Hāratī. It is understood as a feeding ritual to the goddess and her 500 children, even though, as some priests and devotees explain, Hāratī no longer consumes meat given her adherence to the Buddhist precepts (Skt. pañcaśīla). How can this be?

While at first glance stringing the words ‘Buddhist’ and ‘sacrifice’ together may appear to be something queer, in the sense that it is perceived as strange or odd, which provokes discomfort, as Bruce Owens demonstrates, “blood sacrifice as practiced by the Newar Buddhists appears anomalous by virtue of a false comparison between a current practice and selective readings of ancient monastic tracts” (Owens, 1993). The practice of blood sacrifice in Nepal has received considerable attention from scholars engaged in different readings of these rituals (Lecomte-Tilouine 2013; Michaels, 2016; Ripert & Letizia, 2024). To think with Newar Buddhist performative and textual understandings of sacrifice, in this paper, using ethnographic data from the messy archive of ritual manuscripts to the cacophony of voices from ethnographic engagement all dealing with the performance of sacrifice, I argue that mess is an everyday reality not something out of the ordinary.

The practice of ethnography, hanging out, discussing, and participating, is messy. It is a messy practice in the sense that ethnographers literally get their hands dirty in the playground of ritual when they are called to pour alcohol over a sacrificial offering or asked to help devotees wash their hands before worship in a possessed woman’s living room. It is also messy in a methodological sense since engaging with humans presents the ethnographer with “non-coherence and excess” (Law, 2019). The result of these ethnographic engagements, however, is usually a sanitized product “with little acknowledgement of the messy social dynamics experienced and negotiated” (Plows, 2019). Following Manalansan, this paper does not “clean up the mess but rather critically addresses the need to live with, against, and despite the mess” (Manalansan, 2014). Ethnography, therefore, should not pretend to be a clean process.

In his dissertation, The Politics of Divinity in the Kathmandu Valley (1989), Bruce Owens demonstrates, using multi-vocality as an analytical frame, that “though people may be simultaneously engaged in cooperative activity focused on a particular entity or process, their perspectives concerning what they are doing and why may differ sharply.” Therefore, seen through the lens of mess, identity, meaning, and symbols themselves are multivalent, meaning they are muddled, unpredictable, and always emerging. In thinking of multi-vocality and multiplicity as mess we must “tilt the frame to include different positions, perspectives, practices; to identify the complexity of different situations, artefacts, and so-called ‘single issues’” (Plows, 2019). In including these different perspectives or allowing the space for this multiplicity, however, we must not write out the messy dynamics of these processes but rather explore them and their implications.

In light of this, mess is not something that needs to be grasped or comprehended neatly, but something whose existence and reality we must come to terms with. One way of “attend[ing], up front, to messy and excessive realities, politics and ethics” (Plows, 2019) is through an attention to intersubjectivity, an ongoing unconscious process of co-participating and communication (Brown, 2011). Intersubjectivity, as a creative process of co-creation, is inherently messy. In other words, it allows us to realize that “reality is multiple; that it avoids ultimate know-ability; that it shifts and comes into focus, into being, in a multiplicity of ways depending on the practices and methods used to explore it” (Plows, 2019). Intersubjectivity, understood as mess, necessarily involves multiplicity, competing interpretations, and living daily with confusion.

Following psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden (1994), this interplay between individual subjectivities, and the intersubjective network, which exist in a dynamic relationship, creates an intersubjective third. This third, as a messy creation of the in-between, is a unique creation that belongs to no single participant. While the intersubjective third is a collaborative creation, the experience of it is different for each participant. Focusing on the third, where “different relational modes […] are intermingled and co-implicated” (Arregui, 2019) does not make this a space where mess is reconciled and made orderly. To borrow Owen’s (1989) aural analogy, it is not a space for mediating voices, but rather a space for sitting with the cacophony. Mess, therefore, becomes a state of meaningful tension.

As demonstrated by Dzenovska (2020), in relation to a village by the Latvian-Russian border, while it might not initially appear so, “there [is] value to be extracted from the mess.” I choose to focus on “the seemingly trashy, dirty, disgusting, and untidy disorganization of bodies, things and emotions” (Manalansan, 2014) of Newar Buddhist sacrifice. It is not something that needs to be normalized, but rather something that needs be lived with. In this paper, mess, as explored through the practice of sacrifice among Newar Buddhists, is presented as integral to social research that seeks to portray more accurately and sensitively the everyday.