Place · Jain pilgrimage mountain · India

Sammed Shikharjī / Parasnath

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Jain agamic and puranic tradition

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

23.963, 86.137

Connections (7)

• Companion in the same setShatrunjaya / Pālitānā

  Shikharjī in Jharkhand and Śatruñjaya in Saurashtra are the two supreme tirthas of the Śvetāmbara tradition, seventeen hundred kilometres apart. One is a ridge where twenty Tīrthankaras are held to have been liberated; the other is nine hundred temples built on a hill where one was not. Protests in 2023 against Shikharjī's designation as a tourist destination drew hunger strikes across India and forced the government to reverse the order within weeks.

• Mythic displacement toMount Kailāsa

  Jain tradition puts Rishabhanātha's liberation on Ashtāpada, identified with Kailāsa, and twenty of his successors' on Shikharjī. The first and the many are at opposite ends of the Himalaya and the Chotanagpur plateau, and only one of the two can be found on a map. Shikharjī's circuit of twenty tonks runs about twenty-seven kilometres and is walked barefoot in a single day, which is as close as Jain pilgrimage comes to a physical ordeal.

• Companion in the same setSonāgiri

  Sonāgiri and Shikharjī are the two Digambara siddhakshetras of the eastern uplands, and both are hills where the claim is liberation rather than a birth or a teaching. Sonāgiri's hundred white shikharas on a bare Bundelkhand rise are the most concentrated visual statement of that claim anywhere. Sonāgiri is a working ascetic centre rather than a mass pilgrimage, and Digambara munis still keep the rains retreat there, which is what the hill was built for.

• Companion in the same setGirnār Neminath temples

  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.

• Companion in the same setPāvāpurī

  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.

• Companion in the same setChampāpurī

  Champāpurī is the one place where all five kalyānakas of a Tīrthankara happened to one person, Vāsupūjya, and Shikharjī the place where twenty others ended. Between them the two Bihar and Jharkhand sites hold most of what the tradition claims about where its founders actually were. Champāpurī was also Anga's capital, where the Buddha taught and where Ashoka's brother is said to have governed, so one Bihar town holds claims from three traditions at once.

• Site adjacencyDeoghar Baidyanāth

  Parasnath and Deoghar are a hundred and thirty kilometres apart on the same plateau and hold the most important Jain tirtha in India and one of the twelve jyotirlingas. Both draw walking pilgrimages of a scale the region is never credited with: twenty-seven kilometres barefoot over the summits at one, a hundred kilometres from the Ganges carrying water at the other.

On these journeys

• Principal Jain tirthas
• Jharkhand — the Chotanagpur plateau

Sources

Shikharji — Jain tirtha accounts

• Wikipedia