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National Museum of Nepal. Kathmandu is home to a number of museums and art galleries, including the National Museum of Nepal and the Natural History Museum of Nepal. Nepals's art and architecture is a dazzling display from medieval to the present, which is a heady amalgamation of two of the ancient and greatest religions of the world – Hinduism and Buddhism.
Pashupatinath Temple in the capital Kathmandu is a World Heritage Site. Religion in Nepal encompasses a wide diversity of groups and beliefs. [2] Nepal is a secular nation and secularism in Nepal under the Interim constitution (Part 1, Article 4) is defined as "Religious and cultural freedom along with the protection of religion and culture handed down from time immemorial."
About 4.2% practice Islam and 3.6% follow the indigenous Kirant religion. Christianity is practiced officially by less than 1.0% of the population. Hindu and Buddhist traditions in Nepal go back more than two millennia. In Lumbini, Buddha was born, and Pashupatinath temple, Kathmandu, is an old and famous Shiva temple of Hindus.
Newar religious culture is rich in ceremony and is marked by frequent festivals throughout the year. [96] Many festivals are tied to Hindu and Buddhist holidays and the harvest cycle. Street celebrations include pageants, jatras or processions in which a car or portable shrine is paraded through the streets and sacred masked dances.
Some academics studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories: world religions, a term which refers to transcultural, international faiths; Indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or nation-specific religious groups; and new religious movements, which refers to recently developed faiths. [5]
Kathmandu district is a part of Kathmandu Valley, which is a melting pot of various cultural groups, ethnicities, races, languages and religions. This vibrant culture is illustrated in the culture of the natives of the district, known as Newars, who are a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious people bound by a Sanskritized Sino-Tibetan ...
Most Magars also follow a form of Tibetan Buddhism, with priests known as Lama Guru, forming the religious hierarchy. Buddhism is an important part of the culture even in the southern districts, where the Magars have developed a syncretic form of religion that combines earlier shamanistic and Buddhist rituals with Hindu traditions.
The sculpture of Nepal is best known for small religious figures and ritual objects in bronze or copper alloy, but also has other strengths. The Newar people of Nepal had a long-lasting specialism in casting small bronze figures, mostly religious and especially Buddhist, considerable numbers of which were exported to India and Tibet over many centuries.