Journey
Principal Jain tirthas
A Jain tirtha is usually a place where someone crossed over — where a Tīrthankara was born, taught or reached liberation, or where ascetics did. Which is why the great ones are hills: Shikharjī, Śatruñjaya, Girnār, Sonāgiri. You climb to them, and the climbing is the practice. Shikharji alone holds the liberation sites of twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras.
Stops (21)
- Sammed Shikharjī / Parasnath · Sammed Shikharjī — twenty of the twenty-four
Called Tīrtharāj, king of tirthas, because twenty of the twenty-four Tīrthankaras are held to have reached liberation on this Jharkhand ridge. The circuit of its twenty tonks is about twenty-seven kilometres, walked barefoot in a day. Protests in 2023 against its designation as a tourist site drew hunger strikes and a reversal.
- Pāvāpurī · Pāvāpurī — where Mahāvīra died
Mahāvīra reached nirvāna here in about 527 BCE, and the Jal Mandir stands in a tank said to have formed where devotees took away earth from the cremation ground. Dīvālī is kept by Jains as the anniversary of that night — the lamps lit, the tradition says, because the light of knowledge had gone out.
- Champāpurī · Champāpurī — all five events in one place
The only site where all five kalyānakas of a Tīrthankara — conception, birth, renunciation, omniscience and liberation — are held to have happened to one person, Vāsupūjya, the twelfth. It was also Anga's capital, where the Buddha taught and where Ashoka's brother is said to have governed.
- Girnār Neminath temples · Girnār — Neminātha on the twenty-second
Neminātha, the twenty-second Tīrthankara, is said to have renounced, taught and died on this Saurashtra massif, which is also Ambā's hill and Dattātreya's and Gorakhnāth's. Some ten thousand steps climb past a Jain temple city of the twelfth century to summits four traditions each claim.
- Shatrunjaya / Pālitānā · Śatruñjaya — nine hundred temples on one hill
About nine hundred temples in nine enclosures on a Bhāvnagar hill, climbed by some three and a half thousand steps, and the principal Śvetāmbara tirtha. Nobody lives on the summit: the priests and pilgrims descend before dark, so it is a temple city with no permanent population.
- Taranga hill · Tāranga — Ajitnātha in marble
Kumārapāla's Solanki temple of about 1165 to Ajitnātha, thirty metres high on a hill in north Gujarat, and one of the sites both Śvetāmbara and Digambara traditions maintain separately on the same hill — a division of one landscape rather than a dispute over it.
- Dilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū · Dilwāra — marble cut until it passes light
Five temples on Mount Ābū of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, the Vimala Vasahi and the Luna Vasahi above all, whose ceilings are carved until the marble is translucent. Vastupāla and Tejapāla, Vāghelā ministers, paid for the second — merchant-official wealth turned into the finest stone-carving in India.
- Sonāgiri · Sonāgiri — a hundred white temples
Around a hundred whitewashed Digambara temples climbing a Bundelkhand hill, where tradition says a great many ascetics attained liberation. It is a working ascetic centre rather than a mass pilgrimage, and the effect of the white shikharas on a bare hill is its own argument.
- Kundalpur, Damoh · Kundalpur — the big Mahāvīra
A Damoh siddhakshetra with a colossal seated Mahāvīra and some sixty-three temples on a hill. The site is ancient and its recent reconstruction has been argued about, the new marble work being the kind of improvement that removes the evidence it was built on.
- Kunthalgiri, Osmanabad · Kunthalgiri — three arihants
An Osmanabad siddhakshetra in the Balaghat range where three arihants are held to have reached liberation. Ācharya Śāntisāgara, who revived the Digambara muni order in the twentieth century, took sallekhanā here in 1955 — the ritual fast to death, performed in public and recorded.
- Muktagiri, Betul · Muktāgiri — fifty-two temples and a waterfall
Fifty-two Digambara temples scattered up a Satpura hillside beside a waterfall on the Madhya Pradesh–Maharashtra border. Tradition says three and a half crore munis attained liberation here; the arrangement, temples appearing one by one along a stream, is unlike any other Jain hill.
- Antariksh Parshwanath, Shirpur · Antarīksha Pārśvanātha — the idol that floats
A Shirpur shrine whose image is said to stand clear of its pedestal — antarīksha, in the air. Both Digambaras and Śvetāmbaras claim it and the dispute has run through Indian courts for decades, which makes it one of the few tirthas whose ownership is a live legal question.
- Mahavir Ji, Sawai Madhopur · Mahāvīr Ji — the Bhil find
One of the largest Digambara pilgrimages in India, at a Sawai Madhopur village where the image is said to have been found by a Bhil herdsman whose cow gave milk over the spot. The annual fair draws Jains, Hindus and Bhils together, and the Bhil descendants keep a ritual role.
- Kesariyaji, Udaipur · Kesariyājī — Ādinātha and the Bhils
An Ādinātha Digambara tirtha in the Aravallis, called Kālājī for the dark image, and drawing Bhil devotees in numbers that make it as much an Adivasi shrine as a Jain one. Saffron — kesar — is offered by the sackful, which is where the name comes from.
- Osian Mahavira · Osian — the oldest Jain temple standing
A Pratihāra-era complex near Jodhpur whose Mahāvīra temple of about 783 is among the earliest surviving Jain temples anywhere, standing beside Hindu temples of the same decades and the same masons. The Oswal merchant community traces its conversion to this place.
- Nakoda Parshvanatha, Barmer · Nākodā Pārśvanātha — the deity who does business
A twelfth-century Śvetāmbara tirtha in Barmer, known less for its Pārśvanātha than for Nākodā Bhairava, a vyavahāric deity petitioned about lawsuits, loans and business. It is the clearest case of a Jain tirtha holding a functionary for worldly matters Jain doctrine does not provide for.
- Moodabidri 1000-pillar basadi · Moodabidri — the thousand-pillar basadi
The fifteenth-century Chaturmukha basadi on the Tulu coast, called the Jain Kāshī, with a thousand carved pillars no two alike and a roof of tiered timber in the Kerala manner. Its palm-leaf Dhavalā manuscripts are among the most important Digambara texts surviving.
- Manjunatha shrine (Jain-managed) · Manjunātha at Belur — Jains running a Śiva temple
A cross-tradition shrine where a Jain family have administered the Śiva temple for generations. On the Tulu coast Jain kings ruled Hindu subjects for centuries, and the arrangements that came out of it — Jain managers, Hindu priests, one endowment — survived the kingdoms.
- Kazhugumalai Jain beds, Tuticorin · Kazhugumalai — Jain beds in Tamil rock
Rock-cut Jain reliefs and inscriptions in Vatteluttu on a Tuticorin hill, from the eighth and ninth centuries when Tamil Jainism was still substantial. The same rock carries an unfinished Pāndya cave temple, which is what the region's religious change looks like in one outcrop.
- Girnār · Girnār as a mountain, not a temple
The massif itself, distinct from its Jain temple city: five summits carrying Ambā Mātā, Gorakhnāth, Dattātreya and Kālikā above the Neminātha complex, with Ashoka's rock at the foot. It is the most crowded sacred hill in western India and no tradition has ever had it to itself.
- Mount Kailāsa · Ashtāpada — the Kailāsa Jains claim
Jain tradition places Rishabhanātha's liberation on Ashtāpada and identifies it with Kailāsa, so the mountain Śaivas call Śiva's abode and Buddhists call Kang Rinpoche is also the first Tīrthankara's. Nobody has ever located Ashtāpada on the ground with any agreement.