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Three Yakshis Who Guard a Tirthankara's Teaching

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Three Yakshis Who Guard a Tirthankara's Teaching

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Jain Deities gathers three yakshis, the class of guardian goddess that attends a tirthankara in Jain devotional practice, each protecting a different one of the tirthankaras and invoked for worldly welfare rather than liberation, which Jain doctrine holds no deity can grant.

Padmavati is the most widely venerated yakshi in Jainism, attendant deity of the twenty third Tirthankara Parshvanatha, invoked for worldly protection and welfare. Ambika, also called Amba or Kushmandini, is most closely associated with Neminatha, the twenty second Tirthankara, whose teaching she is said to guard and whose shrines fall under her protection, a pairing that mirrors Padmavati's own. She is conventionally shown seated or standing beneath a mango tree, holding a cluster of mangoes, accompanied by her lion mount and two children at her side, an iconography that ties her to fertility and motherhood as much as to doctrinal guardianship, and devotional worship of her is especially prominent within Svetambara Jain temple practice.

Chakreshvari is associated with Rishabhanatha, the first of the twenty four tirthankaras, depicted riding the mythical bird Garuda and typically shown with multiple arms holding a discus among other attributes, and she receives devotional veneration in Jain temples in her own right, functioning, like Ambika and Padmavati, as an intercessory and protective figure within Jain devotional and iconographic tradition. All three appear in temple sculpture and dedicated shrines alongside the images of the tirthankara each attends, a consistent pattern across the three rather than three unrelated cults.

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Article On

Source The JainsPaul Dundas
Sources
The Jains
Paul Dundas, Routledge, 2002View the Source
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