Place · Digambara pilgrimage town · India

Shravanabelagola

Also known as Bahubali inscription, Shravanabelagola — Bahubali inscription

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Digambara Jain tradition; Chandragupta legend

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

12.857, 76.487

Worth knowing

The Mahamastakabhisheka anoints the eighteen-metre Bahubali every twelve years, from scaffolding built for the occasion. The statue was carved around 981 and has been washed roughly eighty times since. At Bāhubali's feet, inscriptions in Kannada, Tamil and Marathi record Chāvuṇḍarāya, the minister who had the colossus carved.

Connections (7)

• In the same set asKumbhakonam

  Both run on a twelve-year cycle, which is the ordinary unit of Indian ritual time — the Mahamastakabhisheka at Shravanabelagola anoints the fifty-seven-foot Bahubali every twelve years, as the Kumbh rotates on the same period. It is a useful reminder that the calendar organising a Jain monolith's anointing, a Kumbh and a Nanda Raj Jat is the same one, derived from Jupiter's orbit.

• PatronageChāmundarāya

  Chāmundarāya had the Gommateśvara carved about 981 — seventeen metres of Bahubali cut from the living granite of Vindhyagiri, standing free with vines carved climbing his legs to show how long he had stood still. It is anointed every twelve years in the Mahāmastakābhisheka. The anointing requires scaffolding to be built to the statue's head and has run since at least the twelfth century, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands each time.

• Architectural modelMūḍabidri

  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.

• Royal renunciationPātaliputra

  Digambara tradition has Chandragupta Maurya abdicate, follow the ascetic Bhadrabāhu south to Shravanabelagola and end his life there by sallekhanā. The cave on Chandragiri is shown as his. It is the tradition's strongest claim on Indian political history and it cannot be corroborated. The Chandragiri cave and the footprints shown there are the basis of an entire Digambara historiography, and modern historians generally treat the whole episode as unprovable.

• Gomateshwara monolithsKarkala Bahubali

  The three Gommateśvara monoliths of Karnataka — Shravanabelagola of 981, Kārkala of 1432, Vēnūr of 1604 — are each cut from living rock and each anointed on the same twelve-year cycle. The later two were commissioned by Tulu Jain rulers explicitly to match the first. Vēnūr's statue is the smallest of the three at eleven metres and Shravanabelagola's the largest at seventeen, so each later ruler matched the form without matching the scale.

• Shared site withDharmasthala

  Dharmasthala is a Śiva temple administered by a Jain family with Vaishnava priests and a Jain heritable trusteeship, sixty kilometres from the Digambara colossus at Kārkala. The Tulu coast's arrangement — Jain rulers, Hindu subjects, shared institutions — outlived the kingdoms that produced it. Dharmasthala also runs one of the largest free kitchens in south India and a network of schools and hospitals, administered by the same Jain family across twenty-one generations.

• Samadhi atChandragupta Maurya

  Jain tradition has Chandragupta abdicate in favour of Bindusara, take initiation under Bhadrabahu, travel south with him and end his life at Shravanabelagola by sallekhana, the Jain fast to death. The smaller hill there is called Chandragiri for him and a cave on it is shown as his. The tradition is Digambara and late, and no Mauryan source mentions it.

On these journeys

• The epigraphic record
• Jain monuments
• Grammar, script and the first vernacular inscriptions
• The making of Indian languages and scripts

Sources

Shravanabelagola; Chandragiri Basadi

• Wikipedia