The Jain Temple

The earliest Jain holy places were not temples but caves and stupas. In the second or first century BCE, rock-cut cells were carved for Jain monks at Udayagiri and Khandagiri in Odisha, one of them bearing a famous inscription of King Kharavela. At Mathura, in northern India, excavations at the site of Kankali Tila uncovered the remains of a Jain stupa and many carved images of tirthankaras from the first centuries CE, among the oldest known. They show that Jains were venerating images of their teachers at least as early as Buddhists and Hindus were venerating theirs.

As the Hindu temple developed in the second half of the first millennium CE, Jains adopted the same basic form: a sanctum under a tower, approached through halls. Jain temples were usually paid for by lay merchants and ministers, for whom building a temple was among the most meritorious acts possible. In western India, under the Chaulukya (Solanki) rulers of Gujarat in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, this patronage produced temples of exceptional richness. Vimala, a minister of King Bhima I, built the first of the Dilwara temples at Mount Abu in 1031, and the brothers Vastupala and Tejapala added the Luna Vasahi in 1230.

The tradition continued through later centuries. At Ranakpur in Rajasthan, the merchant Dharana Shah, with land and support from Rana Kumbha of Mewar, built a vast four-faced temple in the fifteenth century, with images facing all four directions and a forest of carved pillars. Many temples were damaged in times of war and rebuilt, and on sacred mountains whole temple-cities grew up. Jain temple building has never stopped: new temples, in traditional marble, still go up across India and in the diaspora.

Jain teaching holds that the tirthankaras, having attained liberation, live beyond the world and do not answer prayers. Worship of their images is therefore understood as an act of devotion and self-purification: by honouring those who have overcome all passions, worshippers turn their own minds towards the same goal. In practice, many temples also house guardian deities, the yakshas and yakshis attached to each tirthankara, who are believed to protect the faithful and may be asked for help in worldly matters.

In Svetambara image-worshipping temples, lay men and women perform the eightfold worship (ashtaprakari puja) themselves. After bathing and putting on clean unstitched clothes, they bathe the image with water and milk, anoint it with sandalwood paste, and offer flowers, incense, a lamp, rice, sweets and fruit, each offering carrying a symbolic meaning. Rice grains are often arranged on a small table into an auspicious pattern. In the evening the temple is filled with the waving of lamps (aratiarati A rite in which a lamp is waved before an image of a god, then offered to the worshippers. Glossary) and hymns. In Digambara temples, the anointing of the image is more often carried out by designated worshippers or priests, and the offerings are prepared in a slightly different order.

The day begins early. Many lay Jains visit the temple each morning before eating, to view the image (darshan), bow, recite the Navkar Mantra, the most widely used Jain prayer, and circle the sanctum. Those who enter the sanctum to touch the image often tie a cloth over the mouth and nose, so that their breath does not reach it and, in the Jain view, no tiny creatures are harmed. Temples also contain halls or adjoining buildings where monks and nuns preach when they stay in a town, since ascetics, who do not perform the material worship themselves, move from place to place except during the rainy season.

The temple is also the hub of the community’s calendar. During Paryushana, the most important annual festival, called Das Lakshana by Digambaras, Jains fast, listen to readings and ask forgiveness of all beings. Mahavira’s birthday is marked with processions in which an image is carried in a chariot. The consecration of a new image or temple is a great communal event lasting days, and temple trusts run by lay committees look after buildings, finances and pilgrims.

The marble temples of western India are the best known. The Dilwara temples at Mount Abu look modest from outside, but inside their halls and ceilings are carved in white marble so finely that the stone looks almost translucent. Ranakpur, in a quiet valley in the Aravalli hills, is a single great complex of halls, domes and spires rising in tiers around the four-faced sanctum, its light-coloured stone lit by open courtyards.

Jains also build temple-cities on sacred mountains. The hill of Shatrunjaya near Palitana in Gujarat is crowned by several hundred shrines, reached by thousands of steps, and pilgrims climb it at dawn. Mount Girnar in Gujarat is linked with the tirthankara Neminatha, and Sammed Shikhar in Jharkhand is revered as the place where, by tradition, twenty of the twenty-four tirthankaras attained liberation.

Digambara temples, more common in central and southern India, often follow southern building styles and keep their images unadorned. At Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, a colossal standing statue of Bahubali, a revered saint though not a tirthankara, was carved from a single rock in the late tenth century and is anointed in a great ceremony about every twelve years. At Moodbidri, also in Karnataka, the fifteenth-century Saavira Kambada Basadi, the “thousand-pillared temple”, shows how Jain builders in the south adapted the sloping roofs and stone pillars of coastal architecture.

The four-faced plan (chaumukha) seen at Ranakpur is especially characteristic of Jain temples. It recalls the samavasarana, the assembly hall in which, according to tradition, a tirthankara preached after attaining omniscience, appearing to face listeners in every direction at once. Many temples also contain carved models of sacred mountains or of the cosmos as Jain texts describe it, turning the building into a map of the Jain universe.

In the diaspora, Jains have built temples in Britain, North America, East Africa and elsewhere, sometimes in converted buildings, as at the Jain Centre in Leicester, a former chapel adorned with Indian carving.