Jain sacred geography is counted rather than ranked by size, and Parasnath Hill carries the highest count there is: twenty of the twenty four tirthankaras of this cycle are held to have attained moksha here. That arithmetic, and not any building, is what makes it the holiest place in Jainism for both major traditions.
The shrines on the hill are tonks, small structures marking each liberation, and most contain not an image in the ordinary sense but charan paduka, carved footprints. The pilgrim's circuit runs roughly twenty seven kilometres over the ridge, visiting the tonks in sequence, and it is walked barefoot, since footwear on the hill is prohibited. Pilgrims start well before dawn and come down the same day, and the strict observe it without food or water throughout, which in that heat and over that distance is the substance of the vandana rather than an embellishment.
Those who cannot walk are carried in dolis by hired porters. What the porters are paid, and whether a practice of liberation should depend on men carrying pilgrims up a mountain for a day's wage, is argued about within the community and is not a criticism made only from outside.
Both Digambara and Svetambara traditions claim the hill and maintain their own arrangements on it, and the relationship between them, and between both and the state administration, has produced repeated litigation.
The site also draws practitioners of sallekhana, the vow of fasting to death undertaken at the end of life, which Jain teaching distinguishes carefully from suicide and which Indian courts have considered. The atlas records that this occurs at the site and does not describe how it is undertaken.