ABSTRACT
The importance of Newar Buddhism can be summarized under two heads, historical and anthropological. Let us take the historical first. Newar Buddhism is a survival of north Indian Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna Buddhism. Newar Buddhists are the only Buddhists left whose sacred and liturgical language is Sanskrit (apart from a handful of priests in Bali). They are the only South Asians who follow Mahāyāna Buddhism. It was from Nepal that Brian Houghton Hodgson sent forth the Sanskrit manuscripts which enabled the Indological study of Mahāyāna Buddhism to begin. Sylvain Lévi went to Nepal in search of ancient Indian Buddhism. In his three-volume history of Nepal published seven years later in 1905 he declared that Nepal was ‘India in the making’ and that in the Kathmandu Valley one could see ‘as in a laboratory’ the conditions of the late first millennium CE in India.1
