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Jaina Iconography of Orissa
Literary sources for a study of Jaina iconography, date from the earliest known Jaina texts, namely, the Jaina canonical literature of the Angas and Upāngas. But no definite canon about the iconometry or iconography cf Jaina images is found. Of course we have references to Jaina images and shrines in the stock descriptions of the Siddhayatanas. These descriptions include other items of Jaina worship such as the stūpas, the māna-stambha, etc. The torso and legs of a Tirthankara sculpture, with Mauryan polish on it, obtained from Lohānipur near Pataliputra, shows that at least in the age of Samprati, the grandson of Asoka, worship of Tirthankara images had already come into vogue! Jaina traditions, speak of Samprati being converted to Jainism by Arya Suhasti.? Epigraphic evidence also seems to prove that the practice of image worship was current among the Jainas in eastern India even in the pre-Mauryan times. There is a possible reference in the Hathi-Gumphā inscription to the removal of Kalinga Jina from Kalinga to Pataliputra by the Magadhan king Nanda at the time of his invasion of Kalinga and its subsequent recovery by the Chedi monarch Khāravela, who invaded Magadha in the first century B.C. That the practice was well established in the northern India in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era is fully proved by a number of well carved Jaina images and several Ayagāpatas (votive tablets) with Jaina figures in their centre and astamangalas (eight auspicious marks) on their borders which have been profusely discovered in Mathurā.
But from the scanty evidences, it is clear that Jainism as practised in those days in Orissa did not involve the worship of images, for not a single Jaina Tirthankara appears in the original carvings of Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves, the known earliest Jaina site in Orissa. In the absence of any early Jaina image, it is difficult to identify the Jina of Kalinga mentioned in line thirteen of the Hathi-Gumphā inscription of Khāravela with the image of a Tīrthankara. On the other hand, it appears that the worship of symbols was in vogue at that time among the Jainas as among the Buddhists. Jaya-Vijaya-Gumphā (Fig. 14) and Ananta-Gumphā of Udayagiri and Khandagiri hills
1. D. Mitra, Jaina Art & Architecture, Vol. I, A. Ghosh, (Ed.), p. 71. 2. U.P. Shah, Jaina Art and Architecture, Vol. III, A, Ghosh, (Ed.), p. 465-66.
