Place · Jain temple cluster · India
Girnār Neminath temples
The Jain temple cluster on one of the summits of Girnar in Junagadh district, Gujarat, sacred as the nirvana site of the 22nd Tirthankara Neminath — the cousin of Krishna in the Jain narrative who renounced his wedding to Rajul when he heard the cries of the animals being slaughtered for the feast. The 12th-century Neminath temple, built under the Chaulukya patron Sajjan, is the oldest of the Girnar group; three later Jain temples cluster on surrounding peaks. The Girnar ascent — 10,000 steps to the summit — is the single hardest major pilgrimage climb in western India and is accomplished by elderly Svetambara pilgrims regularly.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Jain tradition
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The place is documented; its associated historical or cultural record and its named tradition are distinct layers.
- Location
- 21.500, 70.530
Connections (4)
- PatronageVastupāla
The brothers endowed work at Girnār and Śatruñjaya as well as Dilwāra, and built libraries and rest houses along the roads between them. The Jain tirtha network of western India is to a striking degree the work of merchants and ministers rather than of kings. Their own circle produced several biographies of Vastupāla while he was still alive, including one performed as a play, which is almost unheard of for an Indian minister.
- Companion in the same setSammed Shikharjī / Parasnath
Shikharjī and Girnār are both hills where Tīrthankaras are held to have reached liberation — twenty at one, Neminātha at the other. Girnār has to share its summits with Ambā, Dattātreya and Gorakhnāth; Shikharjī's ridge is Jain alone, which is part of why it is called king of tirthas. Girnār's Neminātha complex is reached by about thirty-five hundred steps and was largely built in the twelfth century under Vastupāla and Tejapāla's patronage.
- Shared site withGirnār
Girnār carries a Jain temple city to Neminātha at about thirty-five hundred steps, and above it Ambā Mātā, then Gorakhnāth, then Dattātreya on the highest summit, with Ashoka's rock at the foot. Four living traditions and one dead empire on one Saurashtra massif, each keeping its own ascent. Girnār is the most crowded sacred hill in western India and no tradition has ever had it to itself, which is unusual for a mountain with a single approach.
- Pitha network withGori Temple, Nagarparkar
Gori Parshvanāth in the Tharparkar desert and the Neminath temples on Girnār belong to the same Shvetāmbara world, and the same patronage: Gujarati and Marwari merchant money building in stone at the western edge of the subcontinent through the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Gori's inscription dates it to 1375–76, within the span of the Girnār rebuilding. The difference is what happened afterwards. Girnār kept its congregation and its whitewash; Tharparkar's Jains had mostly left by 1947, and Gori kept its fourteenth-century paint instead.
On these journeys
Sources
Girnar Jain temples
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