Shravanabelagola is best known today for the Mahamastakabhisheka, the head anointing ceremony performed on the Bahubali statue at intervals of roughly twelve years, timed to a specific planetary configuration in Jain tradition. Scaffolding is erected around the colossus so that officiants can pour a sequence of substances, water, milk, sugarcane juice, saffron paste, sandalwood, flower petals and gold and silver coins among them, over the statue's head, letting them cascade down its full height in front of assembled pilgrims. The ceremony draws hundreds of thousands of Digambara Jains from across India and the diaspora and is among the largest periodic religious gatherings associated with Jainism specifically, as distinct from the much larger pan-Hindu melas held elsewhere in India.
Outside the anointing years, Shravanabelagola functions as a working pilgrimage town and monastic seat, with resident ascetics, an epigraphically important collection of inscriptions documenting Jain royal patronage across South Indian dynasties, and a continuous tradition of image worship distinct from, though historically related to, the aniconic reform traditions such as the Sthanakvasi and Terapanth that arose within Svetambara Jainism further north. The town's inscriptions, some of the oldest substantial epigraphic records of Jainism in South India, have made it a significant site for the historical study of the tradition's spread beyond its earlier heartlands.