Place · volcanic pilgrimage mountain · India
Girnār
Also known as Girnar, Girnār
A single volcanic massif above Junagadh carrying Jain temple groups on one summit, the Dattatreya shrine on another, an Amba Mata shrine, the Nathpanthi Bhavnath fair below, and Ashoka's rock edicts at its foot. A regional pilgrimage made by ascent and clustering rather than by one sanctum.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Local pilgrimage traditions; Jain/Hindu layered landscape
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.500, 70.530
Worth knowing
The climb is some ten thousand steps and the Jain groups at about three and a half thousand hold sixteen temples, including Neminatha's, one of the Svetambara tirthas. The Bhavnath fair brings Naga sadhus down from the hill, and the same rock at the base carries Ashoka, Rudradaman and Skandagupta.
Connections (6)
- Sacred transplantHimalayas
Scholars describe Girnār as one of several peaks across India said to partake of the Himalayas rather than merely resemble them. Its five summits carry Ambā Mātā, Gorakhnāth, Dattātreya and Kālikā shrines above a Jain temple city, so Nāth, Shākta and Jain traditions all treat the Saurashtra massif as northern mountain sanctity lodged in the west.
- Companion in the same setAmbājī
Scholars read Gujarat's two great Ambā sites together: the Shakti pītha at Ambājī in Banaskantha, where Satī's heart is said to have fallen, and the Ambā Mātā summit that opens the Girnār climb. Saurashtra pilgrimage routinely joins them, so the goddess frames the journey at both its plain and its mountain.
- Shared site withGirnār Neminath temples
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.
- AnalogueChampaner-Pavagadh
Champaner-Pavagadh and Girnar are the two Gujarat hills where a political and a devotional landscape are stacked on one another: a sultanate capital below a Shakta summit, and a mountain carrying Jain temple groups, a Dattatreya shrine, a goddess shrine and an Ashokan edict at its foot. In both the hill was sacred first and the state built underneath it.
- AnalogueKolayat
Kolayat in the Thar is where tradition seats Kapila, to whom the Samkhya is attributed, and Girnar carries the Dattatreya and Jain summits. Both are cases of a philosophical or ascetic lineage being given an address far from any school town — a walled tank in the desert and a volcanic massif in Saurashtra — which is how Indian intellectual geography usually works.
- AnalogueHingol National Park
Two arid landscapes where a Hindu pilgrimage and a last wildlife refuge occupy the same ground. Girnār in Saurashtra carries Jain and Hindu shrines up its slopes and sits beside the Gir forest, the only place Asiatic lions survive. Hingol in Makran holds the cave of Hinglāj Mātā, the largest Hindu pilgrimage in Pakistan, inside the country's largest national park and the stronghold of Sindh ibex and Baloch wild sheep. In both cases the pilgrimage route and the protected area were drawn around each other.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Girnar”. Gujarat State Gazetteer, Junagadh district; the Girnar inscriptions in Hultzsch, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. I, and Epigraphia Indica vol. VIII.
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