Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

Page 274

ACCOUNTS OF THE JAINAS TAKEN . . .
arrived in Surat in 1623) in India, often saw and recorded more than the traders and missionaries who were his contemporaries In a village called Cansari he was attracted by a temple1 "the finest I have ever set eyes on ... with domes and balconies soaring into the sky. . . It belongs to the sect called Vertia who shave their heads. Within there is but one figure seated high above an altar at the summit of a flight of steps in rather dim light. Lamps always burn before it, and when I entered a man was devoutly occupied in burning incense to it."
Near Surat Della Valle noted anothr temple very similar to the small village fanes described by the Dutch writers, and probably also Jaina2. Within there were, each in a large niche, "three white marble statues, naked as it would seem the Indians always represent their images and seated in a oriental fashion on the ground with the legs folded underneath. . . . The principal idol-that of the middle niche-is called Mahāvīra from whom the temple takes its name." The author then goes on to speculate whether Mahāvīra is synonymous with Mahādeva. It can of course be employed as an epithet of Visņu, and in fact this usage is probably a conscious Vaisņava borrowing from Jainism; but the occurrence of three images together, and their nudity, suggest a Jina with his attendant sasana-devatās. The author who had some notions of Hindu iconography identified other statues as Brahma and Gaṇeśa, but it is not impossible that he mistook for them the yakṣas of the tenth and twenty-third tirthankaras.
The German, J.A. von Mandelslo, member of an embassy to the court of the Shah of Persia obtained leave to travel in India for his own account. He was there in 1638-9 but his observations were only published posthumously in 1658. Though more interested in social conditions than religion he has left a description3 of
1.
2.
3.
Letters ed. G. Gancia, 1843, p. 560 (I have quoted from this, the last Italian edition as the old English translation reprinted by the Hakuyt Society, London 1892. omits some sentences.)
Ibid., pp. 537-8.
For this see M. S. Commissariat. Mandelslo's Travels in Western India, Bombay 1931 pp. 24-5.
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