Place · Jain tirtha town · India
Champāpurī
The Jain tirtha on the Ganga in Bhagalpur district, Bihar, where tradition holds that all five auspicious events of the twelfth Tirthankara Vasupujya — conception, birth, renunciation, enlightenment and nirvana — occurred, the only Tirthankara so grounded in one site. The ancient Champa was the capital of the Anga mahajanapada and the eastern terminus of the Grand Trunk Road predecessors. The Vasupujya temple and the adjoining Dakshin Mukhi (south-facing) deer-garden shrine preserve the memory. The city is mentioned in the Mahabharata and in Buddhist Pali canon texts as the capital of Angadesa, before its absorption by the Magadhan kingdom.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Jain tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.250, 87.000 (approximate)
Connections (2)
- Companion in the same setSammed Shikharjī / Parasnath
Champāpurī is the one place where all five kalyānakas of a Tīrthankara happened to one person, Vāsupūjya, and Shikharjī the place where twenty others ended. Between them the two Bihar and Jharkhand sites hold most of what the tradition claims about where its founders actually were. Champāpurī was also Anga's capital, where the Buddha taught and where Ashoka's brother is said to have governed, so one Bihar town holds claims from three traditions at once.
- Imperial inscription atUdayagiri & Khandagiri caves
Khāravela's Hāthīgumphā inscription is cut in the Jain caves at Udayagiri near Bhubaneswar and is the fullest royal record of Jain patronage from the early historic period — a king listing his campaigns, his public works and the Jain image he recovered from Magadha, in one long Prakrit text. Khāravela also claims in the same text to have brought back a Jina image that a Nanda king had carried off from Kalinga three centuries earlier, which is the earliest recorded Indian repatriation.
On these journeys
Sources
Champapuri Digambar Jain Siddhakshetra
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