Jainism in Bihar

Author(s): P C Roy Choudhary
Publisher: P C Roy Choudhary Patna

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CHAPTER III
JAIN ARCHITECTURE The famous Jain temples in Bihar will be described separately. A brief note on the characteristics of the architecture may be given here.
The architecture of the Jain temples while conforming to the ritual of the Jains have a similar style to that of the Buddhists and Hlodus of that particular age. There is also a certain amount of regional affinity. It will not be proper to say that there is anything exclusively known as Jain architecture. But as bas been mentioned by Percy Brown in his Indian Architecture :-"In one respect however the Jains made a departure, when at some remote age, having appropriated certain "mountains of immortality” as sacred sites, they proceeded to erect on their summits a considerable aggregation of religious buildings, so that these formed what may be termed temple-cities. To use their own words they “ornamented these holy bills with a crown of eternal Arhat chaityas (tabernacles of saints) shining with the splendour of jewels.” In spite of the known antiquity of these mountain sanctuaries few of the temples comprising them are earlier than the fifteenth century, and most are much later. Various causes have been responsible for the older buildings having been obliterated one being the practice of the Jaias themselves of pulling down their temples when decayed and erecting new ones in their places, many of the walls bearing evidences of this, as they reveal stones of earlier structures having been built into them. Again, the creed during its long history has not been free from internal dissensions, an iconoclastic
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