The Toothache Tree

In the southwestern corner of Durbar Square, next to Kasthamandap, there is a small wooden stump barely visible beneath an extraordinary growth of coins and nails. Tens of thousands of small coins have been hammered into the wood over the centuries by people seeking relief from toothache — the tradition holds that nailing a coin to the sacred stump while thinking of the pain will transfer the suffering to the wood.

It is one of the stranger objects in Kathmandu, and easy to miss. The stump is set against a wall and surrounded by other activity in the square, but if you look for the glinting mass of metal-embedded wood, you will find it. Worth visiting as a reminder that religious practice, even the most idiosyncratic, answers real human needs.

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A story
The custom of nailing coins to the Toothache Tree is believed to transfer the pain to the metal, drawing it out of the body and fixing it in the wood. The god Vaisha Dev — a deity specifically associated with dental ailments — is said to inhabit the stump. Dentistry in medieval Kathmandu was not sophisticated, and the accumulation of tens of thousands of nails driven by suffering people across many centuries gives the stump an almost geological quality — layer upon layer of appeals and offerings to an absent tooth.

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