Pashupatinath: Visiting a Working Cremation Site

Pashupatinath is the most important Shiva temple in Nepal and one of the most important in the world. It is also, and primarily, a place where Hindu families bring their dead for cremation on the banks of the Bagmati.

Visitors are allowed. Visits carry obligations.

What you may and may not do

Non-Hindus may not enter the main temple building. This is not a tourism rule, it is a religious one, and it is enforced at the doors. Visitors are welcome throughout the rest of the complex, including the eastern bank opposite the temple, which is where the cremation ghats are best seen.

The ghats

Cremations take place on stone platforms — ghats — along the river, and they run continuously. They are not a performance. Photographing the bodies or the grieving families is prohibited and, more importantly, is a genuine intrusion on a family during the worst week of their lives.

Photographs of the ghats in general — the platforms, the smoke, the architecture — are usually tolerated. Pointing a camera at a specific funeral is not. If you are unsure whether a frame is acceptable, do not take it.

You are a guest in someone’s worst day. Act like one.

The sadhus

Sadhus — Hindu ascetics, many of them elderly and some of them genuinely living here — occupy the temple side of the river. Several will pose for photographs and will then ask for payment. This is a transaction, not a religious experience.

Agree the amount before you raise the camera, or do not shoot at all.

Practical

Dress conservatively: shoulders and knees covered, shoes removed where shoes come off. The site is about twenty minutes on foot from Boudhanath and easily combined with it in one morning.

Allow two hours. There is also a forested hill behind the temple with deer and monkeys, reached by a footbridge, which most visitors never find.

Ceremony timings vary with the day. Morning and late afternoon are the busiest.