Place · Jain temple hill · India
Shatrunjaya / Pālitānā
The Jain pilgrimage hill of Shatrunjaya at Palitana, Bhavnagar district, Gujarat, climbed by 3,500 steps and crowned with over 800 marble temples built between the 11th and 19th centuries — the largest temple complex on one hill in India. The hill is sacred to Adinath, the first Tirthankara, who is said to have given his first sermon here. Shatrunjaya is the pre-eminent tirtha of Svetambara Jainism, and the twenty-two of twenty-four Tirthankaras who did not reach moksha at Sammeda Shikhara are said to have attained liberation here. Palitana town is India's only entirely vegetarian city by municipal statute, enforced since 2014.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Svetambara Jain tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.485, 71.830
Connections (3)
- Parivrajaka legPandharpūr
Palitana and Pandharpur were both on the route of Vivekananda's wandering years — a Jain temple-city of some nine hundred shrines on one hill, and the Maharashtrian town where the Varkari palkhis converge on Vithoba. Neither was his own tradition. The point of the parivrajaka years was to walk the whole existing sacred map of India, of every sect, and he came back from it with a political and cultural argument rather than a devotional one.
- Companion in the same setSammed Shikharjī / Parasnath
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.
- Companion in the same setDilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū
Dilwāra and Śatruñjaya are the two Śvetāmbara showpieces of western India and the two opposite answers to what temple money buys: five buildings of translucent marble on Mount Ābū, and nine hundred plainer ones accumulated over eight centuries on a Bhāvnagar hill. Nobody sleeps on Śatruñjaya's summit: the priests and pilgrims descend before dark, so it is a temple city of nine hundred buildings that empties every evening.
On these journeys
Sources
Shatrunjaya / Palitana temple complex
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