Linking Faith and Conservation in Sacred and Community Forests of Far Western Nepal

Abstract

Faith and conservation are deeply entangled in the Himalayas. Focusing on a single Hindu community in Darchula, Nepal, we investigate the forms of governance used to manage an extensive sacred forest on a nearby mountain and five smaller community forests at its base. To understand the effects of these different models of governance, we use a mixed method approach to examine two indicators of biocultural diversity: forest resource use and spiritual practices. These data reveal a concentrated human impact on the community forests through the harvesting of plant resources, while the sacred forest receives a far smaller impact from these activities. The community considers the sacred forest and mountain to be the home of a local god, who is worshiped in annual pilgrimages attended by people throughout the region. Spiritual practices in the community forests are more localized, small-scale, and associated with women’s traditions. From a biodiversity perspective, the sacred forest appears useful for conservation because of its large size and the spiritual governance that protects it from most human impacts. In terms of biocultural diversity, however, the two forest types play complementary roles in supporting biocultural heritage: the community forests provide the resources required for daily life, while the sacred forest nourishes identity, embodies communal history, and upholds the fertility of the land. The two forest types ultimately blend together in the ways that they are valued and used by people, showing that only a landscape-level perspective can provide a full understanding of the links between forest and community.

Hariyo ban nepalko dhan

Green forests are the wealth of Nepal

1. Introduction: Defining and Conserving the Forests of Nepal

The Himalayas are a landscape of contrasts and extremes. As the tallest mountains on earth, their sheer verticality has long inspired reverence and a sense of divine presence. Local communities, regional religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, and travelers from afar have often agreed that Himalayan landscapes are enspirited, inhabited by forces and deities, or simply ‘sacred’ (Michaels 2003). Although the idea of sacred Himalayan mountains has been partly influenced by Western fantasies of the Orient (Obadia 2020), it has a well-founded basis in the beliefs of local communities, who do treat certain mountains (although not all of them) as sacred spaces. Mt. Kailash in Tibet, an important pilgrimage site considered the dwelling place of Shiva and associated with the cosmic center Mt. Meru, is the most quintessential example of a sacred Himalayan mountain (Bernbaum 2012).

One environmental aspect of the perceived sacredness of Mt. Kailash is its role as the source of key tributaries for many of the most important rivers of South Asia: the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. Highland watersheds are often designated as sacred landscapes, and the role of Himalayan mountains as watersheds is increasingly emphasized in international discourse, a tendency fed by alarm for our warming and drying planet. The effects of climate change at high elevations (Zomer et al. 2014) as well as increasing levels of spiritual and recreational tourism (Gawlik et al. 2022) also play into international attention to the region. Narratives about the Himalayas often attempt to weave together cultural concerns about the sanctity of enspirited landscapes with biophysical concerns about water resources and fragile ecosystems. A classic manifestation of this dual discourse is the Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL), a transboundary initiative launched in 2010 by the governments of India, Nepal, and China and coordinated by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD 2010). This initiative aims to simultaneously preserve cultural heritage and conserve biodiversity by stimulating sustainable rather than destructive forms of development and promoting international cooperation by linking actors at multiple scales, although these goals have proved challenging to achieve (Vivekanandan 2020).

The focus on sacred mountains and high-elevation watersheds in initiatives like the KSL risks ignoring the fact that the Himalayas are more than snow-capped peaks: they are also heavily forested. Since the forested elevations correspond to the regions where human occupation is widespread, forestry in the Himalayas often has to balance many of the same diverse perspectives and needs as the management of mountains. The prevalence of sacred forests and groves throughout the Himalayas shows that forests, like mountains, are often perceived by local communities as enspirited places. In recognition of such beliefs and the significant forms of protection that they can inspire, the concept of Sacred Natural Sites (SNS) has developed over recent decades to describe these kinds of places (Verschuuren et al. 2010).

Although generic definitions of SNS have proved elusive due to the high variability of land forms and practices to which the concept is applied (Savilaakso et al. 2023), the body of literature using the term is growing rapidly. One attempt to generate a theoretical framework for SNS observed that classifying such sites differs if approached from a spiritual vs. an ecosystem perspective (Ma et al. 2022). Others have pointed out that the concept of ’sacred’ is problematic, since it derives from a Eurocentric sacred/profane duality first proposed by Durkheim (1912) and later popularized by Eliade (1957). In practice, the ‘sacred’ in SNS is complex, situated, and often expressed in taboos, bans, and customary regulations (Tatay and Merino 2023). Zeng (2018), describing the ‘Holy Hills’ of the Dai in China, has emphasized the dynamic nature of these sites by showing that, rather than timeless remnants of pristine forest untouched by people, SNS can instead be constructed, relocated, and restored (Tomlinson and Zhu 2025).

Countries like Nepal and India have taken an interest in sacred forests and groves for their potential contributions to both biodiversity and cultural diversity. The 1993 Forest Act of Nepal, for instance, created an official designation for ‘religious forests’, which are described as sites for religious groups “to develop, conserve and utilize the National Forest of any religious place or its surroundings” (Chapter 7, Section 35). The more recent 2019 Forest Act maintained this definition unchanged. The idea that the conservation of such sites can occur alongside their utilization and development flies in the face of attempts to co-opt SNS as sites of biodiversity conservation, which generally promotes the removal of people from natural environments premised on a strict division between nature and culture. Yet, although people take an active role in many SNS, and some such sites can be influenced by economic concerns that lead to environmental degradation (e.g., Notermans et al. 2016), they do often appear to conserve biodiversity. In the context of Nepal, studies in the Kathmandu Valley have shown that the relict vegetation in sacred groves preserves a high diversity of trees (Shrestha et al. 2020), which in turn supports epiphyte (Devkota 2013) and bird (Katuwal et al. 2016) diversity and sequesters carbon (Shrestha et al. 2016).

However, officially designated religious forests make up only a small fraction of forests in Nepal. Since the 1970s, Nepal has experimented with various forms of community forestry, and the same 1993 Forest Act that created the religious forest designation set up a standardized definition for community forests (Sapkota et al. 2020). This community forestry model has been highly successful, making Nepal into a world leader in community forestry while improving livelihoods (Manandhar and Shin 2013) and increasing incomes (Oli et al. 2016) of community forest members. Over time, however, changes to the regulatory framework have increasingly emphasized scientific forestry approaches that disadvantage local communities, pushing them toward commercial timber production at the cost of subsistence livelihoods (Basnyat 2020), increasing rigid, bureaucratic processes, and enabling the elite capture of benefits (Rutt et al. 2015). At the same time, a nation-wide study has shown that community forests do improve biodiversity, although their influence on carbon storage is mixed and depends on elevation (Luintel et al. 2018).

Clearly, forestry in Nepal is complex, and finding the right balance between local/national governance and scientific/spiritual perspectives while simultaneously managing for cultural practices, commercial resources, and biodiversity has not been easy. Despite the significant research into both community forestry and SNS in Nepal, few studies have presented a synthetic picture of how these different forest designations interact in the lives of individual communities. A study comparing one community forest to a single religious forest in another district found that the religious forest had higher carbon stocks while the community forest had higher tree diversity (Paudyal et al. 2022); however, the study’s small size and the disconnection between the study sites make this comparison of questionable value. Another large-scale study at a Ramsar site in Eastern Nepal found close integration and complementarity between adjacent religious and community forests but emphasized that the Ramsar designation created a tendency to favor higher-scale ecosystem services over the spiritual and cultural values of local inhabitants (Chaudhary et al. 2019).

To better understand the community-level experience of forest management, we studied the articulation between these two common forest designations in a single community in Far Western Nepal. Located within the Nepali portion of the KSL, the community of Malikarjun is both distant from major cities, trekking routes and economic influences, yet of regional importance for the sacred mountain it protects, which is covered by an extensive sacred forest on its upper slopes and a series of community forests at its base. Malikarjun is also close to the Indian border and falls within the broader constellation of sacred sites that characterize the KSL (Lama 2024), making it part of a transboundary sacred landscape. In order to capture the entangled nature of biological and cultural diversity in the ways that local people live in and relate to the forest, we employ the concept of biocultural diversity (Maffi 2005), which is the latest in a long series of attempts to theoretically bridge the nature/culture divide (Bridgewater and Rotherham 2019). Although Verschuuren (2010, 2012) and others have long called for the use of biocultural diversity to understand SNS, this approach is rarely applied in relation to community forestry and remains underdeveloped in Nepal (with some exceptions, e.g., Rai and Thing 2016) and the Himalayas in general.

2. Methodology and Methods

2.1. Methodology

Biocultural diversity is increasingly used to describe the complex and entangled relations between human communities and their natural environments. Influenced by a desire to compare this approach to that of biodiversity, which is regularly quantified, researchers have attempted to generate simple metrics of biocultural diversity that can be applied at large scales, such as spatial correlations between species richness or genetic diversity with numbers of languages, cultural groups, or religions (Maffi 2007; Loh and Harmon 2005; Henson et al. 2021). However, these approaches are difficult to employ at small or local scales, where, as in Malikarjun, most community members share the same ethnic identity, religion, and languages. Various approaches better-suited to local scales have emerged, including assessments of farming practices and crop varieties (Zapico et al. 2015), landscape-level metrics like land use and distribution (Agnoletti et al. 2015), and measures of food networks like home garden diversity and culinary traditions (Calvet-Mir et al. 2016; Plieninger et al. 2018).

On the level of individual communities, however, the value of quantifying biocultural diversity seems questionable, since such attempts necessarily simplify nuanced and situated processes in order to make them comparable at other scales. Nonetheless, given that biocultural diversity has been linked with both community well-being (Sterling et al. 2017) and resilience (Badenoch 2008), it is important to find ways of identifying and assessing it in order to understand how such diversity shapes communal and individual responses to change. For this reason, studies using a biocultural framework continue to generate a range of indicators that can serve as guideposts to arrive at a more qualitative understanding of community-level diversity (Vierikko et al. 2017).

To understand the diversity of ways that people interact with local forests, our study employs two indicators of biocultural diversity tailored to the context of Nepal: plant resource use and spiritual practices. Patterns of plant resource use provide a way to indicate the range of variability in people’s dependencies on different kinds of forests. We also juxtapose these patterns with the governance systems of the two forest types to show the gaps between stated rules and lived realities. Following Pungetti and Cinquepalmi (2012), we consider the spiritual practices that occur in each kind of forest as an indicator of biocultural diversity that speaks to less visible aspects of the diverse relations that community members hold with their landscape. Since spiritual beliefs also condition the ways that people use plant resources, and their resource needs affect the degree to which they follow their spiritual beliefs, these two indicators are themselves entangled in a manner indicative of the biocultural landscape in which they live.

2.2. Study Site

Malikarjun refers to three distinct but overlapping things in this study: a community, the mountain overshadowing that community, and the god that dwells on the top of that mountain. The community Malikarjun, designated as Malikarjun Rural Municipality in the current administrative system, is located in Darchula District of Sudurpashchim Province (previously the Far Western Development Region) in Nepal. It lies midway along the semi-paved road between the market town of Gokuleshwar on the Chamalya River and the Mahakali River, which forms the border with India only 13 km away. The community center is at 1800 m, while the mountain Malikarjun rises to 2800 m (Figure 1).

The people of Malikarjun are primarily Chhetris of the Dhami group, although there are a few Brahmins, other Chhetri groups, and some Dalit families at lower elevations. There are roughly 3000 people and 500 households in the community, some of which are clustered around a small market with one hotel and a few shops, while the rest are scattered on the surrounding slopes. Aside from narrow ridgetops, flat land is almost nonexistent, as is common throughout the ‘mid hills’ of Nepal, as this elevational range is called. Farmland is thus terraced, with households cultivating a combination of wheat, barley, corn, rice, vegetables, and fruit trees depending on soil characteristics and microclimate (Castagnetti et al. 2021). The mother language of the community is Doteli, which is part of the broader Nepali macrolanguage, but standard Nepali and some English are learned in school, and many inhabitants also speak Hindi due to time spent working in Northern India and the influence of Hindi culture and media.

Malikarjun the mountain is closely linked to Malikarjun the community both spatially and in terms of the identity of the inhabitants. The presence of the god Malikarjun atop the mountain peak (who is considered a form of Shiva) has made the community famous in the region. A temple dedicated to the mountain god called Malikarjun Mandir is located next to the market and is surrounded by a sacred grove. Two smaller temples dedicated to Latinath, the son of Malikarjun (who is considered a form of Ganesh, the son of Shiva), are each located one kilometer away from Malikarjun Mandir and are surrounded by their own smaller sacred groves. An extensive sacred forest covers the upper half of Malikarjun mountain, while its lower flanks are divided into community forests.

Each of these forests are managed by Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) composed of a group of households who agree to manage their forest in exchange for access to its resources. Of the seven CFUGs present in Malikarjun, two are too far away from the sacred forest to significantly influence resource use there, so they were excluded from our study. The other five community forests (

Table 1. Details about the five studied community forests provided during interviews.

Community Forest Name	Size (ha)	Year Founded	Member Households	Committee Members
Titekholi	25	1978	52	7
Dhami Dheu	13.5	1988	65	9
Dhaukhani	15.4	1985	51	9
Kaulashin	42	1993	55	11
Kalipatali	16	1993	150	9
Total	111.9	-	373	45

) total nearly 112 hectares and are managed by 373 households, roughly 75% of the community. The more than 100 households that are not part of these five CFUGs likely belong to the other two user groups, although it is possible that some households have been excluded from the community forestry system. However, all the families that we encountered during this study were part of at least one CFUG.

2.3. Methods

This study is based on the independent research project conducted for the first author’s Masters in Ethnobotany. The initial fieldwork took place over two and half months in the spring of 2018, with all of the first four authors working in various capacities to collect data in the field. In 2020, the first author and J.B. returned to Malikarjun for three months as part of another research project on sacred oral literature and agrobiodiversity (Castagnetti et al. 2021), during which further supporting data were collected. Drawing on both of these field visits, this paper is an updated and revised version of Greene (2018).

During both periods in the field, we used ethnographic techniques to learn about the practices and beliefs of the community. This entailed a combination of semi-structured interviews with participant observation of the daily activities of community members, including agriculture, animal care, and plant resource gathering. We began each visit to the community with prayer and offerings at Malikarjun Mandir and abided by all the rules of purity expected of those who live in enspirited landscapes, in particular avoidance of alcohol and meat. To learn about local spiritual traditions, we met many times with the mukhya, the ritual caretaker of the cult of Malikarjun, and with the bhanares or caretakers of the Latinath mandirs. We also interviewed the Latinath spirit medium and members of one of the temple music committees. All interviews were generally conducted in Doteli by members of the field team who grew up in this region and translated to English for the first author, who never learned this language.

Knowledge about the governance of community forests was gathered by interviewing the chairpersons and committee members of all five community forests that we selected for this study. The elected political representative of the municipality and officials in the Darchula and Gokuleshwar offices of the Department of Forests responsible for managing the community forest contracts were also interviewed. To learn about the plant resources relied on by the community, we interviewed farmers, medicinal plant gatherers, a medicinal plant vendor, and many other residents about their knowledge and use of uncultivated plants. Initial interviews with these inhabitants were often at their homes and were supplemented by later visits to the forests in order to see specific sites, participate in resource gathering or preparation, and locate medicinal plants.

In 2018, after two months of gathering information about the history of the community and the inhabitants’ relations to and perceptions of the sacred and community forests, we created a standardized questionnaire to gather more concrete data on plant resource use. At first randomly, and later by targeting households living in proximity to various community forests, we were able to conduct 8–10 household surveys with members of each of the five Community Forest User Groups in our study, for a total of 40 surveys (8% of the community). These questionnaires combined short answer questions about the rules and regulations applied to the sacred and community forests with quantified estimations of their households’ use of various plant resources in different sites.

3. Forest Governance in Malikarjun

3.1. Spiritual Practice and Governance on the Sacred Mountain

The sacredness of the mountain Malikarjun (Figure 2) in the eyes of local inhabitants is due to its role as the dwelling place of Malikarjun the god. Such enspirited mountaintops, which Allison (2019) calls ‘deity citadels’ in the context of Bhutan, are a widespread feature of Himalayan landscapes. Allison emphasizes that, although many of these god-mountains or mountain gods are today associated with Buddhism, they often have older roots, since a key aspect of the spread of Buddhism to Tibet was the subjugation of local landscape deities by legendary masters like Padmasambhava and Milarepa, who converted them into protectors or guardians of the Buddhist dharma. In the Himalayas, such deities often share the same name as their mountain dwellings, and are woven into processes of mandalization or sacralization of the landscape (Yü 2015).

An analogous process of blending and combining local animistic traditions with a broader religious system appears to have played out in Malikarjun, since the mountain god of this Hindu community is considered a form of Shiva, as are many guardian deities of other sacred sites in the KSL (Atreya et al. 2018). The god’s abode is a cave on the mountain peak, and more precisely, a shaligram (ammonite) within the cave. Shaligrams are sacred objects in Hinduism, and, while they are often associated with Vaishnavite traditions, they play a role in Shaivite worship as well (Walters 2018). Community members claim that their ancestors carried this shaligram along with them during their migration from Uttarakhand, India centuries ago, a migration that they attribute to religious conflict with Muslim rulers.

The story recounted by the mukhya, an inherited position who cares for the temple and sacred objects devoted to Malikarjun, is that, after the migration, the god initially dwelled among his people. When he became displeased with them (impurity is often mentioned), the god appeared to the community leader in a dream and explained that he would no longer dwell among his followers, after which the shaligram flew up to the top of the mountain and has lived there ever since. Upon taking up residence on the mountain top, called a shikhar in Nepali, the god instructed his followers through dreams to only worship him there twice a year, but otherwise to carry on their worship down below and not set foot near the shikhar. The followers of Malikarjun relocated to the base of the mountain, where a lingam later appeared, around which they constructed the Malikarjun Mandir. These events run parallel to those recounted in a series of sacred epics called jhodas, which are sung during the biannual pilgrimages and tell the story of how Malikarjun the god migrated from India to Nepal, returned to steal the wife of his great enemy, won the ensuing battle, etc.

This story of migration, proximity and loss is key to understanding the complex relationship between the community, the god, and the mountain. The community members consider themselves and their ancestors to have always been followers of the god, even before they arrived in Nepal, and see themselves as under his protection and blessing. At the same time, they are aware that the god has sought distance from his human followers, which inspires a powerful sense that they must not anger the god again and should respect the distance between them that he has imposed. As a result, roughly the upper half of the mountain is designated as a dharmik ban (religious or sacred forest) and is strictly off limits to people except for the two annual pilgrimages to worship Malikarjun on the shikhar. This kind of forest, which is sanctified through its proximity to a site of numinous power, seems comparable to the type of SNS called ri-rgya in Tibetan (Coggins and Zeren 2014), which “is physically manifested as a contour line, above which is an entirely sacred realm and below which is a secular realm” (Salick et al. 2012, p. 451). In Malikarjun, the location of this boundary line is known at several points, notably on the path used to ascend the shikhar during pilgrimages, but is not otherwise marked.

As a form of what we call ‘spiritual governance’ (Studley and Horsley 2018), this ban on crossing above the boundary line appears remarkably effective. No one enforces it, and no one would attempt to, since community members believe that Malikarjun himself will punish those who attempt to reach the mountain top without his approval and without maintaining spiritual purity. The religious forest is not actually designated as such by the Nepali government, because, according to the forestry officials we interviewed, community members would need to map the forest to apply for its designation, and neither they, the forestry officials, nor anyone else are willing to risk incurring the god’s wrath by entering the forest in order to do so. Malikarjun’s changing wishes about management and worship are shared with the community through occasional possession events involving spirit mediums, as is the case in many cultures in Western Nepal (Lecomte-Tilouine and de Sales 2024; Hitchcock and Jones 1976). We consider this form of governance ‘spiritual’, because it is a metaphysical or spiritual being (the god Malikarjun) that is attributed the authority of defining and enforcing the rules that govern access to and behavior at the sacred site.

The two annual pilgrimages to worship Malikarjun in his mountain cave coincide with the nationally important Hindu holidays of Haribodhini Ekadashi and Harishayani Ekadashi (Anderson 2024). They attract hundreds to thousands of devotees from throughout the region for multi-day celebrations, during which the epic jhodas of Malikarjun are sung by groups of women. Only community members undertake the pilgrimage that culminates these festivities, which involves a preparatory process of purification and then a series of offerings at various sites on the way up to the dwelling place of Malikarjun, where they honor the god with ritual and prayers. As we have explained in another publication (Castagnetti et al. 2021), the pilgrimages, which are called Malikarjun Jatra and Shikhar Jatra in the community, are roughly timed with the sowing period of the two growing seasons in Malikarjun and are considered essential for the maintenance of the annual cycle of fertility that allows the crops to grow.

The details of the cult of Malikarjun recounted up until this point were learned through semi-structured interviews with key knowledge holders and community leaders. These interviewees were generally in close agreement about the key details of the practices. To get a sense of how universal such beliefs are throughout the community, we asked a series of detailed questions in our household survey about (1) what rules apply when people go to the dharmik forest, (2) whether people break those rules, (3) what consequences occur for those who do break the rules, (4) what benefits the dharmik forest provides, and (5) what threats or problems this forest faces.

The 40 respondents of our survey provided more than 30 distinct rules that they felt must be followed in order to undertake a pilgrimage through the sacred forest to reach the mountaintop (

Table 2. Rules for making a pilgrimage to the sacred mountain reported by community members.

Preparations for Pilgrimage	%	Precautions During Pilgrimage	%
Fast beforehand (for 3–30 days)	95	Maintain a pure heart and soul	52.5
While fasting, bathe daily	40	Walk barefoot	22.5
While fasting, do not eat garlic and onions	27.5	Bring offerings (flowers, incense, ghee, bells, water, fruit, rice, candles, etc.)	15
While fasting, do not eat meat	25	Do not speak	7.5
Non-community members must fast longer than community members	17.5	Do not go if there has been a death in the family	5
While fasting, make a daily incense offering	10	Wear only new clothes	5
While fasting, do not eat lentils	10	Do not overtake others; walk in single file	5
While fasting, do not eat leftover food	10	Wear white clothes	2.5
While fasting, do not drink alcohol	7.5	Do not wear red clothes	2.5
While fasting, do not eat fish	5	Do not look at others	2.5
While fasting, do not eat roti	2.5	Do not greet others	2.5
While fasting, offer an oil lamp daily	2.5	Do not bring leather	2.5
		Do not urinate	2.5
		Do not go if you are Dalit	2.5
		Do not cut trees	2.5

). Rules cluster into two categories: preparations to make before the pilgrimage and precautions while undertaking the pilgrimage. There was overwhelming agreement (95%) that people must make a daytime fast (eating only one meal each day after dark) to purify themselves before the pilgrimage, although the reported length of the fast varied widely, with one individual each mentioning only 3 days and an entire month, while most people mentioned 15 days (57.5%) or 1 week (27.5%).

It should be mentioned that respondents were only listing the rules that came to mind, so when they did not mention a rule, it could be because they either do not agree that it is necessary, or because they consider it so obvious that it goes without saying (not drinking alcohol during the fast, for example, or not wearing shoes at a holy site). There was more agreement for how to prepare for the pilgrimage than for the precautions to follow while undertaking it. This seems to indicate that there is greater diversity in the ways that people worship their god than in their ideas about how to achieve spiritual purity, since most listed preparations correspond to common rules of purity in Nepali Hinduism. In any case, these responses reveal both the extraordinary level of respect that people hold for the sacred mountain and its protective forest, and the significant variability in how they enact that respect through their personal acts of devotion.

There was less diversity and greater agreement in the responses to the other questions. A majority of respondents (72.5%) reported that no one breaks the above-mentioned rules, while 7.5% admitted that they did not know, and 7.5% felt that some people had tried. These responses demonstrate an overwhelming certainty that breaking the rules of conduct in the sacred forest is impossible. This makes sense when considering the reported consequences: 82.5% said that people trying to break the rules would not arrive at the shikhar, while others specified that they would be struck by temporary blindness (30%), unspecified harm (10%), legs seizing up (7.5%), falling from the mountain (5%), and withholding of wish fulfillment (12.5%) and blessings (5%) for those who survived. These responses are bolstered by various stories that circulate in the community about people who have attempted to ascend the mountain in impure states or at an unauthorized time, which is always met with dire results (injuries, tiger attacks, instantaneous death, etc.).

People reported a wide range of benefits from the sacred forest and mountain, including that their protection allowed people’s wishes to come true, ensured the blessings of god, healed illness, cured infertility, created well-being, peace, and prosperity, increased medicinal plants and other resources, the milk in domestic animals, and water in the streams, preserved wildlife, etc. Regarding threats to the sacred forest and mountain, 40% felt that there were none, while 20% mentioned a lack of water, and 7.5% or less mentioned wildfires, poaching, decreasing animal populations, a lack of fencing, and fodder, firewood or timber collection at low elevations.

Overall, these responses seem to reveal a robust faith in the positive benefits of the sacred forest and a relative lack of worry about its future. According to these survey data as well as the interviews that we conducted, the system of spiritual governance appears to work remarkably well, so much so that an official, government designation for the religious forest would not add any form of protection that it does not already have through the power of the god Malikarjun and the faith of his followers. Now we will turn to the community forests to examine a very different form of governance.

3.2. Community Forest Governance

The basic set of rules for establishing and managing community forests in Nepal were set out in the 1993 Forest Act and have been regularly revised or updated through a series of guidelines and policy documents that reflect changing political perspectives on forestry at the national level (Sapkota et al. 2020). In the most common model, which is the one present in Malikarjun, prospective Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) map their forest, generate a management plan, and submit their application for validation by the Department of Forests. They then elect committees of 7–11 members of the user group (odd numbers for tie breaking during votes), who are tasked with regulating resource use by setting and enforcing rules. The committees in turn designate a chairperson, who represents them to the user group and the community.

Four of the five CFUGs that we studied have clear protocols for making rules about resource use, while the fifth community forest (Kaulashin) is essentially unregulated due to the lower resource use pressure from its large size. For the other forests, the committees generally draft rules under the direction of their chairpersons and then either vote on the new rules among themselves or put important rule changes to a vote of the whole user group. All committees meet monthly, while user group meetings vary from monthly to annually. One committee is composed entirely of women, in agreement with observations that the community forestry model may sometimes provide a platform where women have greater access to decision making (Lama et al. 2017). That being said, since women are the most important resource users responsible for daily fodder and firewood collection, having control of only one out of five of the CFUG committees should be seen as a very slight and localized improvement in women’s decision-making power at the community level.

According to the interviewed committee members, the grazing of animals is banned in all four regulated forests, while firewood and fodder collection are limited to 1–2 collection periods per year. During those times, households are charged a nominal fee for access, after which they can collect unlimited or set amounts of firewood and fodder during the open period, which is usually 5–7 days. For some households, this is sufficient to stockpile a year’s worth of firewood, but if a household runs out, they can make a special application to the committee. Similar requests are made to harvest timber for house building or repair. Beyond these high-frequency and high-impact activities, other uses of resources such as the collection of wild foods and medicinal plants for home use are allowed without restrictions. Commercial medicinal plant collection is highly regulated because of its potential impact and the high profits that it can offer.

To ensure that rules are being followed, most committees and especially chairpersons informally patrol their community forests. In one CFUG, members who report someone breaking the rules are paid a small reward. When households breaking the rules are detected, a series of escalating fines are imposed based on the number of offenses. These penalties can theoretically culminate in banishment from the CFUG, although this recourse is reportedly never used. In order to determine whether these reported rules are actually known or followed by the general public, we posed the same set of questions about the community forests in our household questionnaire as those posed about the sacred forest: (1) what rules apply when people go to the community forest, (2) do people break those rules, (3) what consequences occur for those who do break the rules, (4) what benefits the community forest provides, and (5) what threats or problems it faces.

The respondents were broadly familiar with the community forest rules, such as applying to the committee for resource use (47.5%), annual periods for resource gathering (42.5%), paying fees for access (22.5%), bans on cutting trees (10%) and grazing (7.5%), etc. In marked contrast to the sacred forest, 45% of respondents reported that some people break the rules and only 32.5% claimed that no one does, while 10% did not know, and 12.5% did not answer. The reported consequences for rule breaking showed some variance with those reported by the CFUG committees, because, while 67.5% mentioned fines, 25% of respondents also explained that their sickle or axe could be confiscated (not a punishment reported by interviewed committee members), and 10% claimed that there were no consequences. In terms of benefits from the community forests, people overwhelmingly mentioned the key resources of daily life: fodder (80%), firewood (72.5%), and timber (52.5%), while others mentioned environmental benefits like fresh air (15%), clean water (12.5%), a healthy environment (10%), the prevention of erosion and landslides (5%), and habitat for wildlife (5%). Most felt that their community forests did not have problems or threats (50%), but others mentioned illegal grazing (12.5%), encroachment (10%), the lack of fencing (10%), deforestation (7.5%), the theft of plant resources (7.5%), and fires, poaching, or lack of rule implementation (5% each).

Taken together, these responses indicate that, while people have a fairly clear understanding of the rules that govern the community forests, they seem far less likely to follow them than those for the sacred forest. They report that rule breaking in community forests is common, that consequences are minor, and list a wide range of threats, all of which are human-caused. This could be due to the proximity of these forests to people’s homes, which makes them easy to access when families run low on necessary resources. This weaker governance might also be linked to the way people think about and relate to the different kinds of forest, since belonging to a CFUG may create some sense of entitlement to the resources that community forests offer, while the spiritual forest remains conceptually off-limits. The tendency to break the community forest rules seems to indicate that bureaucratic processes, laws, and even participatory rulemaking hold less authority over people than their god Malikarjun, who commands a mix of love, respect, and fear. In any case, the variability in responses to all the questions indicates that resource use patterns and pressures likely vary between the different community forests, as do people’s relations with those spaces. The presence of smaller SNS and spiritual practices in community forests may be one factor that partly explains this variability.

3.3. Spiritual Practice in the Community Forests

Although their importance as sources of plants and materials for daily life is clear, community forests are far more than resource storehouses. Established between 1978 and 1993, the community forests we studied were laid out over landscapes with a long history of use by the Malikarjun community. Each forest contains small SNS, including sacred springs, stones, caves, trees, and a number of small shrines established at meaningful locations in the landscape. These sites have heterogenous origins, ranging from places closely associated with the cult of Malikarjun, including some which are described in the oral epics of Malikarjun’s life and deeds, to sites that have been recently established and have little connection to communal traditions.

As we have described in Castagnetti et al. (2021), one type of site found in several of the community forests are sacred springs associated with the seven wives of Malikarjun. These springs are central to the women’s holiday Gaura, which celebrates motherhood, nourishment, and fertility (Kalauni 2024). For the first three days of this festival, groups of women gather at several sacred springs to wash and prepare the offerings that, on the fourth and final day, they present to the god at the Malikarjun Mandir before blessing their families, their community and the land with abundance and fertility. They also carry water from the spring to the temple and pour it over the lingam of Malikarjun, which we interpret as symbolically uniting the fluid feminine essence of the sacred spring with the masculine stone associated with Shiva. For the rest of the year, these springs are sites to respect and keep pure, but they can be used as water sources for normal domestic use. These practices are characteristic of Hindu beliefs, in which water is associated with the sacred feminine and widely used in rituals of purification (Narayanan 2001).

Another category of sites found in the community forests are sacred stones and caves. One pair of stones located on the path leading up to the mountaintop is linked to the cult of Malikarjun, and offerings and prayers for fertility are regularly made there. Offerings and sacrifices can also be made at a cave connected with Bhumiraj, an earth deity, to resolve problems with malevolent spirits or bad luck. A final category of SNS, which includes sacred trees and small stone shrines (Figure 3), are places where people can make offerings and prayers to request forgiveness after having broken spiritual rules at other sites. This last function shows how complex and nuanced the mandalized sacred landscape of Malikarjun is, ranging from places of extraordinary imminence like the shikhar to humble shrines of petition for having failed in one’s religious duties. These forest shrines are generally located in community forests far from houses, at sites that seem carefully chosen to mediate between the inhabited parts of the landscape and those considered too sacred for human presence.

4. Resource Use in the Sacred and Community Forests

4.1. Plant Resources for Daily Life

As we have discussed in the previous sections, the people of Malikarjun rely on forest resources for their daily lives. Many of their resource needs are directly linked with the domestic animals that are kept by nearly all families. In our surveys, people described having slightly more domestic animals per household than people (5.7 humans and 6.6 animals per household on average), primarily cows, water buffalos, and goats. These animals occupy the ground floor of the house, while humans sleep on the second floor, so we might consider them as multi-species households. This arrangement helps heat the dwelling in winter and makes it easy to collect the animals’ manure, an essential fertilizer for the community’s terraced fields. The care of domestic animals falls to the women of the household, who are responsible for the daily provisioning of fodder and bedding materials that are strewn on the floor of the animals’ enclosure.

Aside from the animals, firewood for cooking food is the most critical forest material of daily use. Although some houses near the village center use propane burners for certain kinds of cooking, firewood remains universally important and widely preferred for preparing most dishes, particularly the rotis (flatbread) that are eaten with the evening meal. Timber is another crucial forest product, although most households only need to use it occasionally during house renovations and repairs. Even then, its use is limited to door and window frames, rafters, and other minor applications, since houses in Malikarjun are generally stone-walled and slate-roofed (Figure 4).

Wild plant foods are an occasional supplement to grown or bought vegetables, and their use varies widely in relation to the economic status and individual tastes of different households. Locally harvested medicinal plants are popular for both human and veterinary medicine, although they are primarily employed for more minor health problems and are supplemented by biomedicine from the community clinics for more serious ailments. Commercial plant harvesting, which is significant throughout the Himalayas to supply both Indian and Chinese markets, was a fairly large business in the community in 2018, but when we returned in 2020 it had significantly contracted after the retirement of the largest medicinal plant dealer in the community. Certain plants and especially flowers are employed in rituals and religious offerings, and other species are used to produce domestic products such as brooms and other tools.

4.2. Rates of Resource Use in Different Forest Types

The open-ended questions about governance in the sacred and community forests were a useful technique to learn about people’s perceptions of their forests and their management. However, they provide only anecdotal evidence of how people actually provision themselves with plant resources on a household basis. To supplement this approach, we asked respondents to estimate on a 0–5 scale (0: never; 1: rarely; 2: sometimes; 3: often; 4: frequently; 5: daily) the frequency at which their households harvest plant resources from different types of land: private land around their homes, community forests, the religious forest, and government forests (comprising all lands not falling into one of the other categories).

While most households reported using similar resources (85–100% reported gathering firewood, fodder, bedding, timber, wild foods, and plants for religious offering), their methods for procuring these resources varied widely. The most reported sources of plant resources were the lands around the home (used by 100% of households), followed by the community forests (75%), government forests (27.5%), and the sacred forest (25%). The intriguing figure here is that, in contrast to what we have learned about sacred forest governance, one quarter of households reported harvesting resources from the sacred forest. This appears to contradict the discourse of these same survey respondents about the strict protections of the religious forest, how it should not be visited, and the potential divine punishments for doing so.

Comparing the resource use in the sacred and community forests is revealing (Figure 5). Although resource use in the community forests is far more common, roughly 10% of households do gather every type of plant resource in the sacred forest except timber, which is both expressly forbidden and easy to detect. Commercial medicinal plant harvesting is actually practiced by more households in the sacred forest than in the community forests, likely because these species are more plentiful on the protected higher slopes of the mountain. Some people may also wish to avoid having to share profits with the CFUG committees or follow their regulations. In 2018, for instance, one committee had temporarily banned medicinal plant harvesting to allow plant stocks to regenerate, an action which might actually push plant harvesters to turn to the religious forest.

Does this reveal a widespread pattern whereby people preach their adherence to the strict protection of the sacred forest but secretly raid it for necessary resources? The intensity of resource use indicates, rather, that the story is more complex. The average intensity of resource use for the entire survey group is similar to Figure 5, showing that the sacred forest is under far less overall use pressure than the community forests. However, the average use intensity only for respondents who reported using resources in a given forest (Figure 6) shows that those people who use the sacred forest rely on it for key resources like fodder, bedding, and firewood, which they gather at higher intensities than those who use the same resources from the community forest.

Why do those few households who gather resources from the sacred forest rely on it more intensively than households who use resources from the community forests do? One possible explanation is that these families have no other option, perhaps because of where their homes are located, than to rely on the sacred forest for their household needs. We can rule out the possibility that these households use the sacred forest because they are not members of community forests, since all our survey respondents were CFUG members. But when community forest rules are too strict, or the forests are too small to provide for all their users, people may be forced to find creative solutions, like gathering from the sacred forest. Nonetheless, it seems surprising that the same respondents who clearly explained the nature of the spiritual governance protecting the sacred mountain and forest appear to contradict their own beliefs by reporting how they regularly ‘break the rules’ by entering the protected space to gather resources.

Rather than cognitive dissonance or dishonesty, however, we feel that this situation is indicative of what other researchers have already noted about ‘sacred’ natural sites: that the conceptual binary of sacred/profane is at best an uncomfortable fit with the complex, lived realities of local communities (Tatay and Merino 2023). Rather than a strictly delineated sacred forest that is categorically opposed to a ‘profane’ and thus instrumentalizable community forest below, the dharmik forest in Malikarjun is better understood as a spiritual zone whose sanctity emanates from the shikhar, the highest point on the mountain, where the god dwells. The lowest part of the sacred forest is thus ‘less sacred’ than its highest reaches, so people who are pushed into situations of need may creatively reinterpret its boundaries, reasoning that if they only venture a little way in, they will only anger the god a little bit.

This conclusion is supported by the fact that, while none of the survey respondents claimed that people broke the rules regarding the sacred forest, some did mention that the forest was threatened by fodder, firewood, and timber collection (5% each), explicitly at low elevations, while others mentioned medicinal plants and other resources as benefits of the sacred forest. Collecting a few resources in the sacred forest at low elevations, then, was apparently not considered by most people to be ‘breaking the rules’. The utility of the small forest shrines used for spiritual atonement mentioned in Section 3.3. now comes into clearer focus, since those who are forced by circumstances to gather resources in the sacred forest can ask forgiveness at such sites. Although Malikarjun is depicted at times as a demanding and protective god, he can also be forgiving, and these shrines may give his followers leeway to creatively reinterpret their relations to him and his mountain realm as their needs change.

5. Conclusions: Forests and Biocultural Diversity

As we have shown in the Introduction, forestry is complex and dynamic in the Nepali Himalayas. Clearly, it is no less complex in the small far western village of Malikarjun. In this community, the systems of spiritual governance of the religious forest and the bureaucratic yet communal governance of the community forests exist side by side in a state of simultaneous tension and complementarity. Biocultural diversity is enhanced by this complementarity, because the populations of resource plants harvested in the community forests are reinforced by their relative conservation in the spiritual forest. In the same way, the rarely accessible presence of the god Malikarjun at the summit of the sacred forest provides the central meaning and power of the spiritual practices that occur in the community forests. Together, the two complementary forest governance systems may be both more diverse and more resilient than if either existed in isolation.

To understand how this complementarity developed, we would need more historical data about the dynamics of forest use prior to the founding of the community forests. The residents we interviewed had little to say about this history except that the CFUGs had effectively improved forest quality, in some cases transforming slopes that were little more than shrublands into full-fledged forest through replanting trees and regulating resource use. It would also help to know how long the religious forest on Malikarjun mountain has existed in its current state, since, as Zeng (2018) and others (Tomlinson and Zhu 2025) have shown, such sites are often less timeless than they appear. Although the residents of Malikarjun do portray their sacred mountain as ageless and ahistorical, the evidence from our survey suggests that its boundaries may shift over time in relation to the changing pressures of the community. In some sense, though, the sacred forest of Malikarjun has indeed remained out of time. It has stayed out of reach of the modern tools of scientific forestry and bureaucratic governance by escaping the mapping and official designation that has transformed other such sites into polygons on government documents, making them legible to changing policies and regulations.

Neither we, who have spent months studying these forests, nor the residents, who have passed their lives in contact with them, have a clear idea how large Malikarjun’s sacred forest actually is. Judging from satellite imagery and the contour lines that residents described to us, the protected part of the mountain that faces the community may be roughly equal to the combined size of the five community forests. If this estimate were extended to the three other faces of the mountain, the total size of the religious forest might be triple this size or more. In a study on Himalayan SNS, Studley (2014) estimated that around 25% of the prefecture he focused on in Yunnan, China, was designated as sacred spiritscapes by local communities. Without more thorough mapping of the broader landscape of Malikarjun, we can offer no serious comparison except for the sense that this figure sounds roughly correct. By remaining off the map, the shikhar and its dharmik forest have preserved some of their mysterious power, staying just out of reach of our attempts to know where they begin or end.

As the example of Malikarjun demonstrates, any accurate description of sacred forests must remain agnostic about questions of extent or boundary lines. Although boundaries can be very real in the lived experience of people, such as the solemn gate that marks the beginning of the ascent to the Malikarjun shikhar, they are rarely as absolute as scientists, cartographers and politicians might prefer. Our analysis indicates that the upper boundary of the community forests blends into the lower boundary of the religious forest, so that creative interpretations of relative position can be made. This is precisely the reason that CFUG committees are often keen to fence their community forests (despite the significant cost), because they have observed that creeping encroachment is difficult to combat. Future visits to Malikarjun may reveal if such encroachment affects the spiritual forest as well, a possibility that might tempt us to consider the imprecise boundary between the forests as a site of contestation between spiritual and existential needs. From the perspective of community members, however, these two kinds of needs are bound together and fulfilled within a single biocultural landscape, in which patterns of resource use and spiritual practice intertwine and overlap across perceived boundaries.

Beyond their porosity or extent, what is the real difference between the sacred and community forests in people’s lived experiences? Considering the forms of authority that operate in these spaces, the god’s power seems more absolute than that of the elected CFUG committees in terms of both reported compliance and enforcement. On the other hand, both the god and the committees are apparently open to appeals and can be reasoned with, at least when it comes to the welfare of the people under their jurisdiction. Perhaps a more significant difference is linked with the verticality that so often pervades Himalayan experiences. The immanence of the divine in Malikarjun is up, beyond the inhabited realm, and out of reach of the people in their varying states of purity. From up there, fertility and abundance flow down into the community forests, where they create the flourishing of resources that can be harvested—within the extent of the rules—for those who belong to a CFUG. The complementarity is clear, whether we approach these forests from the perspective of biodiversity, divine presence, or simply logistics.

The biocultural heritage of Malikarjun depends on both the conservation of some resources for and by the god and their daily utilization for and by humans. The diversity of spiritual practices that people use to relate to the god and to their forests, from reverence on the mountain to reparations at the tree shrines below, are also complementary, and weave into a broader fabric of land and community. Both the conservation/utilization of resources and the immanence of the sacred express themselves in gradients that lie across the two forms of forest and their systems of governance, tying them together.

Such enspirited landscapes can best be understood through what Allison (2019) has called spiritual landscape ecology, an approach that we have tried to employ throughout this paper. By anchoring the center of a landscape-as-mandala, Malikarjun the mountain draws upward the devotion of his community and, twice a year, their bodies as well. Serving as a refuge of biodiversity and purity, the overflowing of his blessings travels down to the community below, animating the many shrines and rocks, springs, and caves that act as chakras in the greater spiritscape of his municipality. As we might expect, other mountains in the region bear the names of Malikarjun’s wives, sons, nephews, and even his enemies, unfolding into a constellation of beings, a biocultural landscape that doubles as a spiritual family tree. This mandalized landscape is a reminder of the central enigma of the story of Malikarjun—that the community, the god, and the mountain bear the same name, held together, as they are, by a matrix of forest.