Place · Jain nirvana town · India
Pāvāpurī
The Jain pilgrimage town in Nalanda district, Bihar, 90 kilometres from Patna, where Mahavira — the 24th Tirthankara — attained nirvana in 468 BCE at the age of 72, in a garden pavilion. The Jal Mandir, a marble temple in the middle of a lotus-filled tank, is said to stand where the mourners from across North India took earth as a relic until a pit filled with water. Mahavira's older brother Nandivardhan built the first shrine here. The town is twenty minutes from Pawapuri Jain College, and the five Digambara and Svetambara temples around the Jal Mandir together make Pawapuri one of the most important Jain tirthas in the subcontinent.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Jain agamas
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.087, 85.607
Connections (3)
- Life routeMahāvīra
Mahāvīra reached nirvāna at Pāvāpurī, and the Jal Mandir stands in a tank said to have formed where mourners carried away the earth. Jains keep Dīvālī as that night's anniversary — the lamps lit, in the tradition's own reading, because the light of knowledge had gone out of the world.
- Companion in the same setSammed Shikharjī / Parasnath
Shikharjī and Pāvāpurī are the two great liberation sites of the eastern plain: twenty of the twenty-four Tīrthankaras on a Jharkhand ridge, and Mahāvīra himself in a Bihar tank-shrine a hundred and eighty kilometres away. Jain pilgrimage in the east is organised around deaths rather than births. Jains keep Dīvālī as the anniversary of Mahāvīra's nirvāna at Pāvāpurī, the lamps lit because the light of knowledge had gone out of the world, which is not how anyone else reads the festival.
- Site adjacencyRājagriha / Rajgir
Pāvāpurī, Rājgir and Nālandā lie within about twenty kilometres of each other in south Bihar. Mahāvīra died at one, the Buddha taught at another and a Buddhist university stood at the third — the whole of what the renunciant movements produced, inside one district. Mahāvīra and the Buddha were contemporaries in this same country, and the Pali canon reports their followers arguing, so the two movements began within sight of each other.
On these journeys
Sources
Pavapuri Jal Mandir
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