Place · Jain marble temples · India

Dilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū

Also known as Dilwara, Dilwara, Mount Ābū, Dilwāra, Mount Ābu, Mount Ābu — Dilwāra, Mount Ābū

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Patron dynasty

Solanki / Chaulukya

Tradition

Svetambara Jain tradition

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

24.606, 72.718

Connections (8)

• Parivrajaka legKhetri

  Mount Abu was one stop on Vivekananda's five years of wandering between 1888 and 1893, and it was there that he met the Khetri Maharaja who afterwards funded his travels and gave him the name he sailed to Chicago under. Dilwara's five marble temples, carved thin enough to be translucent, are a Jain tirtha on a hill that is also a Puranic site — the kind of layered place his whole journey was made of.

• Life routeSwami Vivekananda

  At Mount Ābū he stayed with Munshi Jagmohanlal, a Muslim officer of Khetri, and is said to have answered a raja's objection by asking where the difference was. The anecdote is told constantly in the Mission's literature because it is the wandering's argument in one sentence. Ābū also holds the Dilwāra temples, eleventh-century Jain marble carved until it passes light, so the hill where he made that argument is itself shared between traditions.

• PatronageVastupāla

  Vastupāla and his brother Tejapāla built the Luna Vasahi at Dilwāra in 1230, as ministers of a Hindu dynasty spending their own fortune on Jain temples. The ceiling of its rangamandapa is carved until the marble is thin enough to pass light, which is the limit of what stone-cutting has ever reached.

• Companion in the same setShatrunjaya / Pālitānā

  Dilwāra and Śatruñjaya are the two Śvetāmbara showpieces of western India and the two opposite answers to what temple money buys: five buildings of translucent marble on Mount Ābū, and nine hundred plainer ones accumulated over eight centuries on a Bhāvnagar hill. Nobody sleeps on Śatruñjaya's summit: the priests and pilgrims descend before dark, so it is a temple city of nine hundred buildings that empties every evening.

• Solanki GujaratTāraṅga Jain temple

  Dilwāra, Kumbhāriā and Tāranga are the three Solanki-period marble Jain groups of north Gujarat, built within about two centuries by the same tradition of masons who raised Modherā and Rāni-kī-Vāv. The dynasty was Hindu; the money at all three was Jain. Kumbhāriā's five temples stand almost unvisited beside the Ambājī pilgrimage, which passes within a kilometre of them and takes no notice.

• Shared site withChampaner-Pavagadh

  Pāvāgadh and Ābū are Gujarat hills that more than one tradition holds sacred at once — a Śākta pīṭha under a sultanate city at one, Jain marble temples beside a Puranic ascetic landscape at the other. Neither hill has ever belonged to a single religion. Pāvāgadh's Kālikā Mātā temple sits directly under a fifteenth-century sultanate mosque on the same hill, and both are inside one UNESCO listing.

• Architectural modelRanakpur

  Dilwara and Ranakpur are the two marble peaks of western Indian Jain architecture, about two hundred kilometres apart and two centuries apart, and Ranakpur takes what Dilwara does and multiplies it: fourteen hundred and forty-four pillars, no two carved alike, on a four-faced plan with twenty-nine halls. Both were paid for by merchants and ministers rather than by rulers — Vimal Shah and Vastupala at Abu, Dharana Shah at Ranakpur.

• AnalogueGori Temple, Nagarparkar

  Both are Shvetāmbara temples in the arid west, both ring a main shrine with fifty-two subsidiary cells, and both are famous for a surface. At Dilwāra on Mount Ābū it is the marble, carved to translucency on the ceilings and the dome. At Gori it is paint: figural cycles on the dome and corridor vaults that are among the oldest surviving Jain wall paintings anywhere, since fourteenth-century Jain painting is otherwise known almost entirely from palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. Dilwāra survived by being maintained, Gori by being abandoned.

On these journeys

• Principal Jain tirthas
• Vivekananda's wandering, 1888–93
• Solanki / Chaulukya Gujarat
• Jain monuments

Sources

Dilwara Temples, Mount Abu

• Wikipedia