Ancient Records of Pashupatinath

Pashupatinath’s early history is not known from the temple itself, but from what was written about it — Licchavi-era stone inscriptions dated as early as the 5th century CE, a 733/753 CE royal inscription still standing in the temple courtyard, copper-plate land grants, the 14th-century Gopal Raj Vamshavali chronicle, and a chain of colonial-era manuscripts and translations that carried this material into the modern historical record.

No single document tells the whole story, and several of the most-cited ones openly contradict each other. This page catalogs the primary written and inscribed sources behind Pashupatinath’s documented history — what each one is, what it claims, and where historians say the record gets shaky.

This entry is part of our History guide. For the physical, excavated evidence rather than written records, see Archaeology; for how these sources combine into a single chronological account, see Timeline.

Quick Answer: The Record, at a Glance

The sections below go through this record chronologically, from the earliest surviving inscriptions to the archives that hold them today.

Why “Records” Are a Separate Question From Myth and Ruins

Pashupatinath’s history is usually told through three distinct kinds of evidence, and it’s worth separating them before going further. There is the mythological account — the story of Shiva’s broken antler and the herdsman’s cow, covered on our Mythology and Origin pages — which explains why a temple exists at this exact spot but carries no date. There is the physical, excavated evidence — foundations, sculpture styles, coin hoards — covered on our Archaeology page. And there is the documentary record: things someone actually wrote down, carved into stone, or engraved onto metal, closer to the events they describe (or at least closer than a modern retelling).

This last category is what “Ancient Records” means on this page. It’s also the category historians trust the least uncritically and cite the most carefully, because a written record can be copied badly, backdated, exaggerated for a patron, or simply lost — and, in Pashupatinath’s case, several of the most important sources are known only through later copies, colonial-era transcriptions, or translations of texts that no longer survive in their original form.

The Licchavi Stone Inscriptions: Nepal’s Oldest Written Layer

The earliest reliable written evidence connected to Pashupatinath comes from the Licchavi period (roughly 5th–8th century CE), the era historians treat as the beginning of Nepal’s genuinely documented history — everything before it survives only as later legend and chronicle. Two kinds of Licchavi-era evidence matter here: inscriptions specifically about Pashupatinath, and inscriptions from the same period that establish the wider dynastic timeline the temple’s history sits inside.

The single most important on-site document is the Jayadeva II stele, a stone inscription still standing just inside the temple’s western gate. Scholars who have examined the stone give its date as Samvat 157 of the Licchavi-era calendar — converted by different historians to either 733 CE or 753 CE depending on which calendrical baseline is used, a discrepancy that appears throughout the secondary literature and that this page doesn’t try to resolve. What the inscription actually contains is more interesting than its exact date: it lays out a royal genealogy running from the sun-god through a chain of legendary Pauranic kings before reaching a ruler named Supuspa, and it goes on to record temple donations, including a silver lotus offering. Historian D.R. Regmi and others have noted that the inscription’s early genealogy is “no less imaginative” than the palace chronicles it’s often used to correct — a reminder that even a stone inscription can blend verifiable royal record-keeping with mythologized ancestry.

Jayadeva II’s inscription matters for a second reason: it is one of the sources scholars use to place Supuspa Deva — credited elsewhere with Pashupatinath’s earliest temple construction — some 39 generations before King Manadeva I (r. c. 464–505 CE), whose own reign is separately fixed by dated inscriptions and coinage found across the Kathmandu Valley, including the well-known panegyric stele near Changu Narayan and 5th-century sculptural donor carvings on Pashupatinath’s own temple complex gateway. Because Manadeva’s dates are comparatively well anchored by independent evidence, the Jayadeva II genealogy is one of the main tools historians use to work backward toward an approximate — not exact — window for the temple’s earliest construction. For how that estimate feeds into the wider political history of the era, see our Licchavi Era page.

These inscriptions don’t survive in isolation. Around sixty Licchavi-period inscriptions have been surveyed across the Kathmandu Valley, most of them stone slabs recording royal donations, land grants, and religious endowments. The standard modern reference for this material is Dhanavajra Vajracharya’s Licchavikalka Abhilekh (“Inscriptions of the Licchavi Period”), published in 1973 by the Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies — a compiled, Devanagari-transliterated, Nepali-translated edition of the corpus that remains the primary scholarly source cited in Pashupatinath research today, alongside Hari Ram Joshi’s companion volume Nepalko Prachin Abhilekh.

Copper Plates and Land-Grant Records

A second category of ancient record moves from stone to metal. Copper-plate inscriptions — engraved sheets recording royal land grants, tax exemptions, and endowments to temples and monasteries — become an important documentary source for Nepal from the medieval period onward. The earliest known Nepalese copper-plate inscriptions are dated to around 1100 CE, and Licchavi-era stone inscriptions themselves occasionally reference earlier copper-plate grants that no longer survive, meaning the practice is older than the extant physical examples suggest.

For a site like Pashupatinath, whose upkeep depended on land endowments and trust income for most of its history, this kind of record is significant precisely because it’s administrative rather than devotional — it documents who funded the temple’s maintenance, priesthood, and rituals, rather than why the temple was sacred. That same documentary thread continues much later into the Shah era, when formal guthi (religious trust) endowments and royal land grants were recorded to fund the temple’s operations — a practice discussed in more institutional detail on our Shah Dynasty page.

The Chronicles: Nepal’s Vamshavali Literature

If inscriptions are the most reliable ancient records, vamshavalis — dynastic chronicles, literally “genealogies” — are the most cited, and the most debated. The most important of these for Pashupatinath is the Gopal Raj Vamshavali, a 14th-century manuscript written in Classical Newar and Sanskrit using the Bhujimol script, compiled during the reign of King Jayasthiti Malla and generally dated to around 1389 CE. It is considered Nepal’s oldest surviving chronicle and the single most-cited source for the claim that Pashupatinath was built by the Licchavi king Prachanda Deva — or, in a second reading found in other chronicle passages, by Supuspa Deva, who is credited with raising a five-story wooden temple over an earlier, simpler linga shrine.

The manuscript itself has an unusual modern history. It was rediscovered in Kathmandu’s Durbar Library (also described as the Bir Library) in 1898–99 CE by the British Sanskritist Cecil Bendall, and was known for decades afterward as the “Bendall Vamshavali” before Nepali historians renamed and re-catalogued it. A full scholarly edition — transcription plus Nepali and English translation, prepared by Dhanavajra Vajracharya and Kamal P. Malla — was not published until 1985, meaning the text used in most 20th-century histories of Pashupatinath predates modern critical editing. Scholars also note that the chronicle’s own sourcing shifts partway through: entries from Jayasthiti Malla’s own reign appear to be the compiler’s direct observations, while earlier entries — including everything about Pashupatinath’s founding — were drawn from older written and oral material, with dating that researchers describe as inconsistent.

The Gopal Raj Vamshavali is not the only chronicle in circulation. Nepal’s broader vamshavali tradition includes well over a hundred surviving manuscripts — a 2019 preservation survey lists around 110 — most composed or compiled in the late 18th and 19th centuries, after the Shah dynasty’s conquest of the Kathmandu Valley in 1768–69 gave rise to renewed royal interest in dynastic history. Titles include the Hindu Bhashavamshavali, the Rajavamshavali, and a number of smaller, group-specific vamshavalis. Only a handful have ever been translated into English in full, which is part of why later, more accessible sources — particularly 19th-century colonial translations — ended up shaping so much of the popular record.

Colonial-Era Accounts and the First English Translations

Because the original vamshavali manuscripts were difficult to access and written in classical Newar and Sanskrit, most of what entered international scholarship about Pashupatinath’s early history arrived through a chain of British colonial-era visitors, residents, and translators — several of whom are still cited today, even though their original source texts are, in more than one case, now lost.

• Captain William Kirkpatrick visited Nepal in 1793 on a diplomatic mission and produced one of the earliest European accounts of the kingdom, published posthumously in 1811. His account drew on chronicle material available to him at the time — but the actual manuscript he used has since been lost, meaning modern historians can only assess his work secondhand.
• Francis Buchanan-Hamilton followed with his own account in 1819, based on research conducted around 1802–03, adding further chronicle-derived material to the European record.
• Brian Houghton Hodgson, British Resident in Kathmandu through much of the 1820s–40s, was the most consequential single figure in this chain. Hodgson collected a large body of Sanskrit and Newar manuscripts and commissioned translations, much of which survives today as the Hodgson Collection in the British Library. Later historians — including Bikram Jit Hasrat, who published English translations found among the Hodgson papers in 1970 — have relied on this collection precisely because so many original source manuscripts elsewhere have since disappeared.
• Daniel Wright published the most widely cited 19th-century English version of a Nepali chronicle in 1877: History of Nepal, an English translation of a Parbatiya-language vamshavali carried out by Munshi Shew Shunker Singh and Pandit Shri Gunanand, with an introduction by Wright drawing on his ten years of residence in the country. This translation — not the original manuscript, which itself was never published — is the version most 20th-century Western and popular accounts of Pashupatinath’s founding ultimately trace back to.
• Later scholars, notably the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi, worked with still other, separately sourced chronicle material, adding further variant readings to an already inconsistent published record.

Modern historiographers studying this chain have been blunt about the problem it creates: as one 1986 assessment put it, for several of these chronicles “there are neither adequate texts nor translations in print” — where a translation exists, the original is often lost or unpublished, and where a text survives, no reliable translation may exist alongside it. Much of the 19th- and 20th-century popular history of Pashupatinath was therefore built on reports about these documents rather than on direct access to them, which is part of why later Nepali scholarship placed such emphasis on returning to primary inscriptions wherever they still physically exist.

20th-Century Nepali Scholarship and Where the Records Live Today

The most significant corrective to the colonial-era translation chain came from Nepali historians working directly with primary inscriptions in the 20th century. Dilli Raman Regmi’s multi-volume histories of ancient and medieval Nepal, and Dhanavajra Vajracharya’s epigraphic compilations — the Licchavikalka Abhilekh (1973) for the Licchavi period and the later Madhyakalin Abhilekh for the medieval period — reset the field’s evidentiary base back onto inscriptions read and translated directly from stone, rather than through several layers of prior translation. This body of work, produced through Nepal’s Institute (now Centre) for Nepal and Asian Studies at Tribhuvan University, is what most contemporary academic writing on Pashupatinath’s early history now cites first.

Institutionally, Nepal’s ancient and medieval records are today held across a small number of public archives. The National Archives of Nepal, formally established in 1967 from the earlier royal Bir Library collection (itself dating to 1900), holds manuscripts and historical documents under the Department of Archaeology. The Kaiser Library, opened to the public in 1969 after being donated to the government by the family of Kaiser Shumsher Rana, holds a further tens of thousands of books, manuscripts, and documents, including material relevant to temple history. Beyond these two government-run institutions, an estimated 70–75% of Nepal’s known manuscripts — collectively numbering in the hundreds of thousands — remain in private and community collections such as Kathmandu’s Asha Archives, many still undergoing cataloguing and digitization. Nepal’s Department of Archaeology, established in 1952, and the legal protections created under the 1956 Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, are what formally brought Pashupatinath’s physical and documentary heritage under modern institutional custody — a process covered in more depth on our Modern Nepal and Temple Preservation pages.

Where the Records Disagree

Readers researching Pashupatinath’s history will run into contradictions quickly, and it’s worth naming the main ones directly rather than smoothing them over:

• Who built the first temple. Different chronicle passages credit either Prachanda Deva or Supuspa Deva, and some sources treat them as the same figure under different names rather than resolving which built what.
• The Jayadeva II inscription’s date. Commonly converted to either 733 CE or 753 CE depending on the calendrical baseline a given historian applies to the inscription’s stated Samvat year.
• How reliable the vamshavali genealogies are. Historians including D.R. Regmi have explicitly noted that even the earliest inscriptional genealogies — not just the later chronicles — blend confirmed royal succession with legendary or Pauranic ancestry, meaning “written down” does not automatically mean “verified.”
• Access to original source texts. For several of the colonial-era accounts most often quoted in popular Pashupatinath histories, the original manuscripts the authors worked from no longer survive, so modern readers are relying on 18th- or 19th-century transcriptions and translations rather than the source documents themselves.

None of this means the record is unreliable as a whole — it means Pashupatinath’s early history rests on converging lines of evidence (inscriptions, coinage, sculpture, and chronicle) rather than any single authoritative document, which is standard for a site this old anywhere in South Asia. Where this page states a fact plainly, it reflects points of general scholarly agreement; where sources genuinely conflict, that’s noted rather than resolved artificially.

Frequently Asked Questions

For more direct answers, see our full FAQ section.

Where to Go Next

• Timeline — how these records combine into a single chronological history
• Origin and Licchavi Era — the earliest period these records document
• Archaeology — physical, excavated evidence alongside the written record
• Malla Era and Shah Dynasty — how documentary evidence continues into the medieval and early modern periods
• Kings — the rulers named across this documentary record
• Temple Preservation and Modern Nepal — how these records came under formal legal and institutional protection
• Historical Maps — cartographic records of the temple and its surroundings
• Research Papers, Books, and Sanskrit References — further primary and scholarly sources

This entry is part of our History guide, covering the recorded eras, evidence, and preservation of Pashupatinath Temple across the Kirat, Licchavi, Malla, Shah, and Rana periods.

The Pashupatinath is an independent devotional and cultural resource. It is not the official website of the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) or the Government of Nepal. For official temple notices, consult PADT directly.