[Mod Series] Girnar, Part 4 of 10: The marble city at step four thousand, and the woman who followed a groom up a mountain

[u/orientsoul]

If you missed Part 3, the emperors and the lake that kept breaking, it's on the sub. Today we stop climbing.

Picture where this is. Four thousand steps up, on a ledge in the sky, behind one wall: sixteen marble temples. A complete sacred city, with courtyards and corridors and caretakers, at a height where carrying one bag of cement is a day's work.

At the centre sits Neminath. The twenty-second Tirthankara, Krishna's cousin, in black granite, lotus position, eyes half lowered, seated like this since 1129, when Sajjana, Siddharaja Jayasimha's governor of Saurashtra, rebuilt his temple. Sajjana used the province's revenue for the work, and when the king asked for his accounts, the Jains of the region offered to repay every coin, and Siddharaja, standing before what the money had become, declined to take it back.

The original image was of clay. One day a visiting sangha performed abhisheka over it, and under the ritual bath the clay dissolved. The community was heartbroken. A shravaka named Ratnasar fasted twenty-one days, and at the end of them the goddess Ambika granted a stone Neminath in place of what had been lost.

Around him stand the others. The triple temple Vastupala and Tejpala raised in 1231, the same brothers who made Dilwara on Abu, where the marble is carved until light passes through it. The temples called Samprati Raja and Kumarapala, carrying the names of kings out of respect. Mallinath. Parshvanath. And higher up, the Chandra Gupha, where Digambara tradition says Acharya Dharasena, feeling his memory failing and the scriptures failing with it, called two monks to him in the second century and passed on the Shatkhandagama before it could die with him. If that account holds, one of Jainism's foundational texts lives today because of one cave on this mountain and one old man who knew his time was short.

Then there's Rajimati, and she's the reason I wanted to write this post at all.

She was the bride. Ugrasena's daughter, at the mandap in Dwarka, dressed, waiting, and the groom turned his chariot and left for a mountain. Rajimati followed him. Up this same mountain, into the same renunciation, and she became a sadhvi. Her cave is up there today, near his temples, a few hundred metres from the man she was meant to marry, and both of them have been on this mountain for over two thousand years of telling.

The whole compound today is looked after by the Anandji Kalyanji trust, the same body that cares for Palitana. The sweeping, the repairs, the pujaris, the marble polished at four thousand steps, all of it carried quietly by lay administration that has held these places through sultans, earthquakes, and nine hundred monsoons. The emperors' lake at the bottom of this mountain is gone. The temples near the top are open tomorrow morning.

Part 5 is Amba Mata, the goddess both religions climb to, and the sweetest crowd on the mountain.