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Digambara and Shvetambara Temple Traditions

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Digambara and Shvetambara Temple Traditions

Jainism's two major traditions, Digambara and Shvetambara, differ on questions of monastic practice and canon that also shape how each depicts the Tirthankaras in temple imagery: Digambara images typically show the ford maker unclothed and without ornament, in keeping with that tradition's stricter reading of monastic renunciation, while Shvetambara images are commonly adorned with eyes inlaid in glass or precious stone and dressed in ceremonial decoration for particular festivals, reflecting a somewhat different devotional sensibility even though both traditions revere the same twenty four Tirthankaras. Both traditions built some of the most architecturally elaborate temple complexes in South Asia, and the marble temples at Mount Abu in Rajasthan, particularly the Dilwara group built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, are especially renowned for ceilings carved in such minute and undercut detail that the stone appears almost lace like, an achievement made more remarkable by the fact that marble had to be transported to the site from some distance. Ranakpur, also in Rajasthan, spreads its main temple across an unusually large footprint supported by more than a thousand intricately carved pillars, reportedly no two of them identical.

At Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, the monolithic Gommateshwara statue of Bahubali, carved from a single granite outcrop in the tenth century and standing well over fifty feet tall, represents an entirely different architectural approach within the same broader tradition, a single colossal sculpture on a hilltop rather than an elaborately decorated temple hall.

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