Place · Digambara temple town · India
Mūḍabidri
Also known as Moodabidri, Mudabidri, Jain Kashi, Bidire, Mūḍabidri — the Jain temple town
Eighteen Digambara basadis in one small Tulu-country town, built between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries by Jain merchant and Chauta ruling families and roofed in the local idiom of tiled timber rather than in stone — Jain architecture translated into a coastal Kerala-Karnataka building tradition.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Digambara Jain tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.067, 74.995 (approximate)
Worth knowing
The town holds the Dhavala manuscripts, palm-leaf copies of the Digambara canon written in Kannada, Sanskrit and Prakrit and guarded for centuries — which is why it is called the Jain Kashi. The Tulu coast's Jain families administered Hindu temples as well, which is why Dharmasthala's hereditary administrators are Jain.
Connections (2)
- Architectural modelShravanabelagola
Kārkala's Bahubali of 1432 and Vēnūr's of 1604 are deliberate copies of Shravanabelagola's of 981, commissioned by later Jain rulers of the Tulu country to claim the same standing for their own capitals. All three are anointed in the Mahāmastakābhisheka on the same twelve-year cycle. Mūdabidri's basadis also carry tiered timber roofs built for monsoon rather than sun, so Tulu Jain architecture is unlike Jain building anywhere else in India.
- Site adjacencyMoodabidri 1000-pillar basadi
Mūdabidri's thousand-pillar Chaturmukha basadi is the pre-eminent shrine of the Tulu Jain country and holds the palm-leaf Dhavalā manuscripts, among the most important Digambara texts surviving anywhere. The Kārkala colossus stands twenty kilometres away, raised under the same Bhairarasa rulers. The Dhavalā manuscripts were kept unread for centuries and only edited and published in the twentieth, which is how a canonical Digambara text came to be effectively rediscovered.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Moodabidri”. Archaeological Survey of India monument records; M.A. Dhaky on western Indian temple architecture; the Digambara and Svetambara temple trusts’ own records.
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