Kharatara Gaccha

Kharatara Gaccha's distinguishing legacy is arguably less its size, always smaller than Tapa Gaccha, than the manuscript libraries, called bhandars, that its monastics and lay patrons built up over centuries, particularly in Rajasthan. Jaisalmer and Bikaner in particular hold substantial bhandar collections associated with Kharatara Gaccha patronage, housing palm leaf and later paper manuscripts covering Jain scripture, Sanskrit and Prakrit grammar, poetry, astronomy and medicine, copied and preserved by generations of the lineage's monks and the lay families who funded their upkeep.

These collections have become important resources well beyond Jain studies itself, since manuscript preservation in Rajasthan's dry climate favoured survival of texts that have not come down to us from other regions, and modern scholars of Sanskrit and Prakrit literature draw on Kharatara Gaccha associated bhandars for material with no other surviving copy. The lineage's name itself, commonly read as the stricter or more severe gaccha, is traditionally connected to a public dispute over correct temple and image practice in which Vardhamanasuri's group took the harder line against a rival teacher, though the exact terms of that early dispute are less firmly documented than the manuscript tradition that followed it. Kharatara Gaccha remains active today, smaller than Tapa Gaccha in monastic numbers but maintaining its own succession of acharyas and its own temple communities, concentrated in but not limited to Rajasthan.