Kings Connected to Pashupatinath

Pashupatinath has never belonged to one dynasty. Licchavi kings are the earliest rulers on record to have built and endowed it, Malla kings of Kathmandu rebuilt it into its present form after a 14th-century looting and added the gold roof still standing today, and every Shah king of unified Nepal from 1768 until the monarchy’s 2008 abolition treated it as the kingdom’s royal shrine — with Pashupatinath’s Aryaghat serving as the traditional cremation site for the royal family itself. This page works through that lineage era by era, with a full reign-by-reign table of the Shah kings and the specific, sourced connection each dynasty had to the temple.

This entry is part of our History guide. For the documents and inscriptions this timeline is built from, see Ancient Records; for legends and personal stories about individual rulers rather than their political timeline, see Kings in our Stories & Legends guide.

Quick Answer: Every Dynasty’s Connection, at a Glance

The sections below go through each dynasty in order.

The Kirat Kings: Tradition Without a Written Trace

Nepali chronicle tradition places a line of Kirat kings over the Kathmandu Valley before the rise of the Licchavis, following an even earlier, largely legendary Gopal dynasty. No Kirat-era king is named in connection with Pashupatinath specifically in any surviving inscription, and no contemporary archaeological evidence from the Kirat period has been confirmed at the site. What later chronicles do preserve is the general claim that reverence for the site predates the Licchavi dynasty’s arrival — consistent with the idea, covered in more depth on our Kirat Era page, that Pashupatinath’s sanctity as a place of worship considerably predates any king who can actually be named and dated.

The Licchavi Kings: The First Names on the Record

The Licchavi dynasty (roughly 5th–8th century CE) provides the first kings historians can connect to Pashupatinath through actual inscriptions rather than later chronicle retelling. Several names recur across the sources:

• Vrishadeva (Vishvadeva) — Manadeva I’s great-grandfather. Chronicle tradition credits him with consecrating a great trishula (trident) at Pashupatinath and constructing a Buddhist vihara later identified with Swayambhunath — an early example of the site’s layered Hindu-Buddhist patronage.
• Manadeva I (r. c. 464–505 CE) — the earliest Licchavi king whose reign is independently fixed by dated inscriptions and coinage found across the valley, including the panegyric stele near Changu Narayan. Manadeva’s dates are the anchor point historians use when estimating the era of earlier, less precisely dated rulers named in connection with Pashupatinath’s founding.
• Supuspa Deva and/or Prachanda Deva — the two Licchavi kings credited, in different chronicle passages, with Pashupatinath’s earliest temple construction. Supuspa Deva is specifically credited with a five-story wooden temple raised over a simpler, open-air linga shrine. Because the sources disagree on which king did what, most modern accounts present both rather than resolving the question — see our Ancient Records page for how historians weigh this conflict.
• Amshuverma (r. c. 598–621 CE) — a later Licchavi ruler whose coinage and inscriptions confirm continued organized royal administration in the valley during the period Pashupatinath’s early expansion is generally placed within.
• Narendradeva and Shivadeva II (r. c. 685–701 CE) — successive Licchavi kings in the generations immediately before Jayadeva II; Shivadeva II married Batsa Devi, continuing a Licchavi pattern of marriage alliances with plains dynasties.
• Jayadeva II (r. 713–733 CE) — the king behind Pashupatinath’s single most important surviving inscription: a stone stele still standing inside the temple’s western gate, recording a royal genealogy and temple donations, and dated to Samvat 157 (converted by different historians to either 733 or 753 CE). Jayadeva II married Rajyavati, daughter of the king of Kamarupa, continuing his father’s diplomatic marriage strategy. His inscription is considered by some historians to be among the last substantial Licchavi-period records before a poorly documented gap in the chronicle record.

For the fuller political and dynastic context these kings ruled within, see our Licchavi Era page.

The Transitional Kings: Medieval Reconstruction

Nepal’s chronicle record grows thin after Jayadeva II, and historians describe the following centuries as a genuinely difficult period to reconstruct from named rulers. Two kings do stand out specifically in connection with Pashupatinath’s physical upkeep during this gap:

• King Shivadeva, generally placed in the 11th to 12th century (some sources give a reign around 1099–1126 CE), is credited with reconstructing the temple following a period of decay — a reminder that Kathmandu Valley’s humid climate made periodic rebuilding of wooden temple structures a routine part of royal patronage, not an exceptional event.
• King Ananta Malla, associated with the 13th century, is credited with adding the temple’s first formal roof structure — a meaningful step toward the tiered pagoda form recognizable today, and one of the earliest specific references connecting the “Malla” name to Pashupatinath, well before the Malla dynasty’s later dominance of the valley.

The Malla Kings: Rebuilding After Ruin, and the Temple’s Final Form

The Malla dynasty dominated the Kathmandu Valley from roughly the 12th through the 18th centuries, eventually splitting into three rival city-kingdoms — Kathmandu (Kantipur), Patan (Lalitpur), and Bhaktapur — after King Yaksha Malla’s reign ended in 1482. Pashupatinath, sitting within Kathmandu’s territory, was primarily the responsibility of Kantipur’s kings, several of whom left a specific, documented mark on the temple:

• King Jayarjuna Deva — the king credited with rebuilding the temple and restoring its lingam after the traumatic 1349 CE raid attributed to Sultan Shamsuddin of Bengal, during which the temple was looted and the sacred lingam reportedly damaged. His reconstruction is one of the clearest examples in Pashupatinath’s history of the pattern that defines much of its later story: damage followed by deliberate, royally sponsored rebuilding rather than abandonment.
• King Shivasimha Malla (r. c. 1578–1620 CE) — some sources describe the temple, by the end of his reign, as restored close to its modern layout, following continued termite damage and structural decay to earlier wooden elements.
• King Pratap Malla (r. 1641–1674 CE) — the most prolific Malla-era builder-king of Kathmandu, remembered for reshaping much of Kathmandu Durbar Square (Hanuman Dhoka, the Kal Bhairav image, Sundari Chowk) and for religious works at Guhyeshwari and Swayambhunath. At Pashupatinath specifically, Pratap Malla is credited with renovating the temple and its shrines, offering a gold umbrella to the deity, and raising a commemorative pillar at the temple’s southern gate to mark a Koti Hom ritual and gold-weighing ceremony he performed there — one of the more personally documented royal visits anywhere in the temple’s Malla-era history.
• King Bhupatindra Malla — credited by most sources with the temple’s final major reconstruction, dated 1692–1697 CE, which produced the signature two-tiered gold-gilt copper roof, silver-plated doors, and carved wooden struts that still define the temple today. Some sources instead credit this reconstruction to a closely named ruler recorded as Bhupalendra Malla — a discrepancy historians treat as reflecting the same kind of chronicle inconsistency found throughout Pashupatinath’s early record, rather than two separate confirmed rebuildings.
• King Jaya Prakash Malla — the last independent Malla king of Kathmandu, whose reign ended with Prithvi Narayan Shah’s conquest of the valley in 1768. Historical accounts describe Jaya Prakash Malla drawing heavily on the trust funds of Kathmandu’s temples, including Pashupatinath’s, to pay for troops defending the city against the advancing Gorkhali army — a decision that reportedly strained his standing with his own subjects in the kingdom’s final years.

For the wider political story of this dynasty across all three valley kingdoms, see our Malla Era page.

The Shah Kings: Two and a Half Centuries as Royal Patrons

When Prithvi Narayan Shah completed his conquest of the Kathmandu Valley and proclaimed himself king on 25 September 1768, Pashupatinath’s status shifted permanently: from a major regional temple under a local Kathmandu dynasty to the de facto royal and national shrine of a unified Nepal. Every Shah king who followed, for the next 240 years, inherited that same custodial relationship — formalizing land endowments, funding temple trusts, and, in several documented cases, being cremated at Aryaghat, the cremation ghat closest to the temple that became customarily reserved for royalty. The full table below lists every Shah monarch’s reign.

A few of these reigns carry a specific, sourced connection to the temple worth noting individually. Prince Bahadur Shah, Prithvi Narayan Shah’s son and an influential regent during the unification period, died at Aryaghat, Pashupatinath in 1797 — one of the earliest confirmed instances of the royal family’s cremation tradition at the site. Rana Bahadur Shah’s reign (1775–1806) left behind some of the earliest surviving administrative records of organized trust management at the temple. Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah expanded on that foundation with further land dedications early in the 19th century. And Birendra Bir Bikram Shah’s role as founding chief patron of the PADT in 1986 marks the point where royal patronage of Pashupatinath shifted from a personal, dynastic role into a formal institutional one — covered in more detail on our Modern Nepal and Temple Preservation pages.

For the century-long stretch of this table (1846–1951) during which hereditary Rana prime ministers held effective governing power while Shah kings remained largely ceremonial figureheads, see our Rana Period page — Pashupatinath continued to be maintained as the national shrine throughout, under the same trust-based system the earlier Shah kings had established.

After the Monarchy: 2008 to Present

Nepal formally abolished its monarchy on 28 May 2008, ending 240 years of Shah dynastic rule and, with it, the temple’s centuries-long relationship with a reigning royal patron. Despite this political transition, Pashupatinath retained its cultural status as Nepal’s national shrine independently of the monarchy that had once been its chief custodian; the PADT, established under Birendra in 1986, continues to manage the temple’s conservation and daily administration in coordination with Nepal’s Department of Archaeology, now reporting to the republic’s civil government rather than a royal chief patron.

Royal Ritual at Pashupatinath: Beyond Construction and Patronage

Not every king’s connection to Pashupatinath shows up as a building project or a trust endowment. For the Shah dynasty especially, the temple was woven into the ritual life of the monarchy itself, and several of these traditions are worth separating from the construction history above.

• Royal cremation at Aryaghat. The ghat closest to the main temple became the customary cremation site for Nepal’s kings and senior royal family members, a tradition documented as early as 1797 with Prince Bahadur Shah and continuing through the 20th and into the 21st century. This is distinct from Aryaghat’s everyday use by the public, discussed on our Temple Complex page.
• Royal attendance at major festivals. Reigning Shah kings customarily attended or sponsored observances at Pashupatinath during Maha Shivaratri, the temple’s largest annual gathering, reinforcing the monarchy’s public identity as defender and patron of Nepal’s state religion. Details on the festival itself are covered on our Shivaratri page.
• Guthi trust oversight. Long before PADT’s 1986 establishment, Shah kings personally administered or delegated oversight of the religious land trusts (guthi) that funded the temple’s priesthood, daily rituals, and physical upkeep — the same administrative thread traceable back through Rana Bahadur Shah’s late-18th-century records to the Licchavi and Malla-era endowments discussed on our Ancient Records page.
• The symbolic transition of 2008. When the monarchy was abolished, Pashupatinath’s institutional management did not pass to any successor royal figure — it remained with PADT, already a decade into functioning as a formal trust independent of any single patron’s reign, which is part of why the temple’s daily operation continued without interruption through the political transition.

Where the Record Disagrees

Several points in this royal timeline are genuinely contested rather than simplified for readability:

• Who built the first temple — Supuspa Deva and Prachanda Deva are both credited in different chronicle passages, and some scholars treat them as the same figure under different names.
• Who completed the temple’s final 17th-century reconstruction — sources split between Bhupatindra Malla and Bhupalendra Malla, two closely named rulers.
• Exact reign dates for early kings — particularly across the Licchavi dynasty and the “dark period” gap after Jayadeva II, where historians have had to reconstruct sequences from partial genealogical lists rather than continuous dated records.

As with the rest of Pashupatinath’s documented history, these disagreements reflect genuine gaps and inconsistencies in the surviving chronicles and inscriptions — covered in more detail on our Ancient Records page — rather than errors introduced by retelling.

Frequently Asked Questions

For more direct answers, see our full FAQ section.

Where to Go Next

• Ancient Records — the inscriptions and chronicles this royal timeline is drawn from
• Licchavi Era, Malla Era, and Shah Dynasty — the full political history behind each dynasty
• Rana Period — the century when Shah kings reigned but Rana prime ministers ruled
• Timeline — this royal lineage set against the temple’s full chronological history
• Kings and Saints in our Stories & Legends guide — personal anecdotes and legends about individual rulers
• Temple Legends and Miracles — stories connected to specific reigns
• Modern Nepal and Temple Preservation — how royal patronage became institutional management under PADT
• Why is Pashupatinath Famous? — the temple’s dual identity as pilgrimage site and national symbol

This entry is part of our History guide, covering the recorded eras, rulers, 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.