ABSTRACT
Both Hindu and Buddhist residents of the Kathmandu or Nepal Valley conceptualise its sacred places as constituting a mandala, i.e., a circular arrangement of deities, one that is homologised macrocosmically to the whole universe, mesocosmically to the Indic socio-cultural and public space, and microcosmically to the individual worshipper's body and person. This chapter elucidates the configuration of the mandala, that quintessential and powerful metaphor that the Indic civilisation has so long lived by. It delineates the cultural history of the pan-South Asian Tantric traditions within which the author's ethnographic data are embedded. The chapter introduces the mandala trope, which is so overwhelmingly widespread in the Indic civilisation and is transparently exhibited in the spatial distribution and the civic space of the three major traditional towns of the Valley where the author's informants make their lives, namely Bhaktapur, Kathmandu and Patan. The chapter describes the macro and microcosmic facets of this potent and ubiquitous cultural design for Indic living.
