Origin from 1228
In 1228, the Svetambara Jain monk Jagatchandra Suri, then a member of the Brihad Gaccha lineage, broke away over what he saw as its laxity in ascetic discipline. For his own lifelong practice of continuous fasting, he was given the title Tapa, meaning ascetic or meditative, by Jaitrasimha, the Guhila ruler of Mewar in Rajasthan, and the title passed to the whole monastic lineage he founded, the Tapa Gaccha. The order that traces its founding to this event grew into the largest surviving Gaccha of Svetambara Jainism; centuries later, under Acharya Hiravijaya Suri in the sixteenth century, it organized a mass pilgrimage to Mount Shatrunjaya and consecrated a temple there, and it counts several thousand monks and nuns today against a Kharatara Gaccha reduced to a small remnant.
Facts
Dates
StatusEstablished marks the Tapa Gaccha's own account of its thirteenth century founding, as later Jain lineage chronicles record it, not an independently corroborated date. Scholarship on the order notes that the founding narrative survives only in later texts called pattavalis, with no contemporary inscription confirming it, which is the ordinary evidentiary condition of most medieval Jain monastic founding accounts. Cross-Tradition Connections
Occurred In
Spread Event Of
Adds a specific, dated institutional milestone between the ancient Digambara Svetambara split and the community's nineteenth century arrival in Zanzibar already recorded here: the founding of the monastic lineage that grew into Svetambara Jainism's largest surviving order.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.