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ARCHITECTURE Depiction of Meru was perhaps nowhere done in architecture, but occurs in plastic art and painting. It is actually the caityalayas and the Påpduka forest with the four silas which make the Meru significant.
The word Meru may mean here a mountain (fig. XLVII), but in most of the canons of achitecture it is described as a type of prāsāda, mostly multistoreyed. According to the Brhat-sanhita (LVI, 20)• a type of hexagonal buildings has twelve storeys, variegated windows and four entrances and is 52 cubits wide and of forty-five kinds. There are some Jaina records, both epigraphical and literary, which mention temples having been made and called after the Meru, but no traces of this particular type of building have as yet been seen. Again, Buhler suggests that the suffix mer seen in the nomenclature of quite a few cities in Rajasthan, e.g. Ajmer, Jaisalmer, Barmer, etc., represents the meru-type of präsada, i.e. the Jaina temple which might have been built by someone whose name prefixed to meru gave the name to the concerned city. The suggestion is plausible, but the suffix may have come from maru, 'desert.
NANDISVARA-DVĪPA
Nandiśvara-dvipa (above, p. 518), the eighth continent in the middle world, is the most significant out of the innumerable continents except the two-and-a-half ones. Just in the middle of the two rims of the circular continent are mountains, black in colour, therefore called Afijanas, named Devaramapa in the east, Nityodyota in the south, Svayamprabha in the west and Ramapiya in the north. Each of the Aõjanas has again in each direction a square lake which accommodates a mountain called Dadhi-mukha. White as curd and circular in shape, it has on its top tafa-vedis or edge-railings and parks. In each of the two outer corners of the four lakes is a golden circular mountain called Ratikara. That is, there are four Añjapas, sixteen
1 U.P. Shah, Studies in Jaina Art, Banaras, 1955, pp. 117-18. He incorrectly names one Meru as panica-meru in fig. 78, as he does also in the text.
• Acharya, op. cit., pp. 512-15. * Journal of Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, VI, p. 318.
• G. Bohler in Indian Antiquary, XXIV, p. 164. In addition to many examples given by Bühler may be meationed Jaya-meru. Śri-Karana-mangalam, E. Hultzsch, 'Inscriptions of Rajarāja P. no. 50, South Indian Inscriptions, III, p. 103.
Not the Inst, as U.P. Shah saya, op. cit., p. 118.
The Nandisvara-kalpa in the Vividha-tirtha-kalpa of Jinaprabba-Sori, Santiniketan, 1934, pp. 48-49, slightly differs in saming the mountains, etc...
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