Shivalingas and Chaityas In Representation of 8 Cremations Ground From Nepal
Author: Ashish Shrestha | Independent Researcher on Culture and Tantra
Published 31st October, 2025
Here in this post, I am sharing about one of the most remarkable and little-understood subjects in Nepalese art, the appearance of shivalingas and chaityas together within the representations of the eight cremation grounds of Nepal.
This study is based on Gudrun Bühnemann’s research, Shivalingas and Chaityas in Representations of the Eight Cremation Grounds from Nepal (2007), a work that uncovers the subtle blending of Buddhist and Saiva imagery in late Malla-period Nepal.
My purpose here is not to repeat her technical discussion, but to interpret its meaning, its sources, and its cultural resonance, in language that is simple, reflective, and open to understanding.
There may still be gaps or points that invite further discovery, and I remain open to correction and refinement.
What follows is a re-telling of how art, ritual, and philosophy met in the carved stones and painted mandalas of seventeenth-century Nepal, where the Buddha’s stupa and Shiva’s liṅga came to rest side by side.
Key Takeaways
The fusion of Buddhist and Shiva imagery in seventeenth-century Nepal marks a rare moment of artistic and spiritual unity.
Chaityas and liṅgas appear side by side in depictions of the eight cremation grounds, symbolizing harmony between the Buddha and Shiva.
Inspired by Gudrun Bühnemann’s research, the study reveals how Newar artists of the Malla era bridged ritual, philosophy, and art.
Stone carvings and mandalas from Patan and Kathmandu reflect a shared Tantric vision of death, rebirth, and transcendence.
The pairing of stupa and linga embodies Nepal’s inclusive spiritual identity and timeless understanding of non-duality.
This artistic synthesis stands as a testament to Nepal’s enduring creativity, where faiths converged to express one truth through art.
About Shivalingas and Chaityas
The cremation ground, or śmaśāna, holds a unique place in Tantric imagination. It is a landscape of dissolution where worldly boundaries vanish and ultimate reality becomes visible.
In the Buddhist Yogini tantras, texts such as the Cakrasaṃvara, Hevajra, and Buddhakapāla tantras, the eight great cremation grounds form the outer circle of the Heruka mandala, aligned with the eight directions.
These spaces are not only external sites but inner realms of consciousness. Some Buddhist texts, as Bühnemann notes, describe each ground with its own guardian deity, serpent king, tree, cloud, and sometimes a caitya or funerary monument.
Once codified in this way, the cremation grounds became cosmic zones, microcosms of the entire universe, mirroring concepts in Abhidharma thought and later Tantric physiology, where the eight cremation grounds were mapped onto the human body.
The same imagery also entered Saiva Tantric circles. The Picumata-Brahmayāmala, a strongly Kāpālika text preserved in a manuscript dated 1052, describes an initiation mandala with nine cremation grounds, eight around one in the center, each presided over by a Rudra (Bühnemann 2007: 28).
Another Saiva scripture, the Svacchandatantra, speaks of Svacchandabhairava surrounded by eight cremation grounds, each ruled by a Bhairava (Bühnemann 2007: 28).
These early textual patterns show how both Buddhist and Saiva tantras adopted the same mandalic structure, using the number eight to express the fullness of spatial and psychological directions.
In the Newar world of the Kathmandu Valley, this parallel development found an artistic form of its own. Bühnemann traces how, from the seventeenth century onward, artists began to depict each cremation ground with not only a caitya but also a linga, two memorial symbols that, while belonging to different traditions, both mark the presence of death and transcendence.
The earliest known examples of this synthesis appear in Buddhist paintings from Nepal portraying the Cakrasaṃvara tradition.
A seventeenth-century Cakrasaṃvara mandala preserved in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena (dated 1648), already shows each cremation ground containing both chaityas and lingas.
Other examples include paintings of Saṃvara and Vajravarahi from private collections (Mookerjee 1966: 31), an eighteenth-century Heruka painting in the National Art Gallery, Bhaktapur, and later depictions from London, Paris, and the R.R.E. Collection (Bühnemann 2007: 25–26).
Before this period, however, the pairing did not appear. Earlier fourteenth and fifteenth-century mandalas, such as those of Buddhakapāla from Densatil Monastery in Tibet, or Nepalese works executed for Tibetan patrons, include only chaityas but no lingas (Bühnemann 2007: 26).
Bühnemann’s comparison shows that the combination first surfaces in art made specifically for Nepalese patrons, not for Tibetan ones.
The earliest dated example is the 1648 Cakrasaṃvara mandala, while another from 1689 omits the lingas again (Bühnemann 2007: 26).
This suggests that during the mid-seventeenth century, artists experimented with a new visual code that reflected their own local ritual sensibilities.
A parallel development took place in Saiva art. At Tusha Hiti in Patan, built in 1647 by King Siddhi Narsingh Malla, two stone sculptures of fierce goddesses sit above friezes depicting cremation scenes.
Each frieze shows four cremation grounds, and together they complete the sacred eight. Both chaityas and lingas appear in these scenes, along with small figures of yoginis and goblins.
Similar compositions appear in Mohan Chowk Hiti in the Hanuman Dhoka Palace of Kathmandu, built only a few years later, in 1652 (Bühnemann 2007: 27).
Bühnemann identifies these as the oldest surviving examples in stone of the caitya-linga pairing. They coincide almost exactly in time with the Buddhist painted mandala of 1648, suggesting a shared visual language between the Buddhist and Saiva workshops active under Malla patronage.
Other examples extend across Nepalese painting and architecture: a seventeenth-century image of a form of Shiva in union with his Shakti in Bhaktapur (Macdonald & Vergati Stahl 1979: 126); a painting of Guhyakali in the Zimmerman Collection (Pal 1991: 81); a painted yantra of Pratyangira dated 1765 in the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi; and a similar yantra of Guhyakali from the same manuscript (Khanna 1979: plate 81).
Wooden reliefs of 1757 at the Kumari House in Basantapur Tole and contemporary wall paintings in the Jayavāgīśvarī temple at Deupatan repeat the motif (Bühnemann 2007: 28).
The pattern runs consistently from mid-seventeenth to nineteenth century, uniting painting, sculpture, manuscript art, and architecture under the same iconographic concept.
This artistic evidence is supported by textual sources from Nepal. The Swayambhu Purana and the Dharmakośa Sangraha of Amṛtānanda (1826) both describe eight cremation grounds each containing a caitya and a liṅga (Bühnemann 2007: 31–32).
The Dharmakośa Saṅgraha gives detailed names for both elements: for example, the cremation ground Caṇḍogra is paired with the caitya Kāyavajra, Gahvara with Vākvajra, Jvālākula with Cittavajra, and so forth (Bühnemann 2007: 30).
These pairs correspond, with minor variation, to those listed in the Vajrapradipa commentary by Surata, an eighth-century Buddhist text cited by Bühnemann (Bühnemann 2007: 30).
The presence of both lingas and chaityas in these late Nepalese texts confirms that the combination was not simply an artistic whim but had a scriptural and ritual foundation within Newar Tantric culture.
The appearance of this fusion invites a deeper question: what caused two distinct symbols, the stupa of the Buddha and the linga of Shiva, to merge in the same sacred space? Bühnemann offers several insights. One is the historical context of Nepalese craftsmanship.
Newar artists of the Malla period, skilled in both Buddhist and Hindu iconography, often worked for patrons across sectarian lines. Their shared workshop culture fostered the natural borrowing of motifs (Bühnemann 2007: 32).
Another factor is the shared deities worshiped in both traditions. Guhyakali, for example, appears in Saiva lists as a form of Kali and in Buddhist systems as Nairātmya, the wisdom consort of Hevajra (Bühnemann 2007: 33).
Such dual identities made the transition between Saiva and Buddhist imagery fluid, allowing symbols like the caitya and liṅga to coexist without contradiction.
This cultural fluidity was particularly strong in the late Malla period, a time characterized by what Bühnemann calls “innovative fusion”.
The royal courts of the seventeenth century in Patan, Bhaktapur, and Kathmandu were deeply Tantric. Kings like Siddhi Narsingh Malla and Pratap Malla were initiated into Saiva and Buddhist rites alike.
The art of their palaces reflected their inner ritual worlds: fountains and temples became cosmic diagrams, populated by both Saiva and Buddhist deities.
The combination of lingas and chaityas in their sacred architecture thus mirrored the inclusive spiritual identity of the Malla state.
Through this lens, each cremation ground becomes a symbolic microcosm of non-duality. The linga, representing pure consciousness or Shiva, stands as the axis of being, while the caitya, representing awakened mind or the Buddha, stands as the monument of liberation.
Their pairing in the place of death transforms the cemetery into a mandala of transcendence, a reminder that life and death, form and emptiness, Shiva and Buddha, are not opposites but two aspects of one truth.
Seen this way, the art of the cremation grounds also reveals a philosophical bridge. As Sanderson has shown, elements of the Saiva Vidyāpīṭha, including passages from the Picumata-Brahmayāmala, influenced Buddhist Yoginī tantras such as the Cakrasaṃvara cycle (Sanderson 1994: 94–98; 2001: 40–47, cited in Bühnemann 2007: 29).
The textual borrowing that occurred in early medieval India found new life in the Kathmandu Valley, where both traditions were practiced side by side. What Bühnemann’s paper illustrates, through art, is the visible surface of this deep textual and ritual exchange.
Her work also reminds us that the cremation ground is more than a frightening place, it is a realm of insight.
For both Saiva and Buddhist yoginis, it represents the dissolution of the ego, the burning away of illusion. The stupa and linga, both memorials of the dead, mark this transformation.
In combining them, Nepalese artists were not mixing faiths but expressing the shared Tantric understanding that liberation arises from confronting impermanence directly.
The earliest stone friezes of Tusa Hiti, carved during the reign of Siddhi Narsingh Malla, embody this understanding in physical form.
Water flows above scenes of fire, death, and renewal, passing over chaityas and lingas carved side by side. The fountain becomes a living mandala, a circle of life, death, and immortality.
Bühnemann notes that the same imagery was repeated in the royal fountain of Mohan Chowk in Kathmandu in 1652, built by King Pratap Malla.
The near-identical dating of these two sites suggests a deliberate theological statement, one shared across the royal houses of Patan and Kathmandu.
The symbolism is layered: the linga represents the eternal principle that survives destruction, while the caitya marks the perfected mind that arises from it.
Their union in the cremation ground mirrors the inner realization sought in Tantric practice, the recognition that death itself is an illusion within the play of consciousness.
Bühnemann concludes that this unique fusion most likely crystallized in Nepal during the mid-seventeenth century and was carried forward in later centuries through both artistic tradition and ritual manuals (Bühnemann 2007: 33).
Further study of local Newar texts, she suggests, may reveal earlier or more explicit references to this synthesis.
Reflecting on her findings, one begins to see the quiet genius of the Newar vision.
By uniting the linga and caitya, they were not simply blending Hindu and Buddhist symbols; they were expressing a universal principle: that awakening and creation are one process, that the path of the Yogini and the devotee meet at the same center.
The eight cremation grounds, once fearful and liminal, become images of transformation, and the shared presence of Shiva and the Buddha marks the convergence of wisdom and energy, Shakti and śūnyatā.
It is humbling to realize how art from four centuries ago continues to speak with such quiet confidence about the unity of paths that many still see as separate.
In the meeting of the stupa and the linga, the artist of the Malla period carved a truth beyond boundaries, a vision of harmony born from the shared depth of the human search for liberation.
See the full post on Facebook.