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SVASTI - Essays in Honour of Prof. Hampa Nagarajaiah
Annual Practices The first feast in the year is gyan panchami. The Jains worship the Kalpasutra. The devotees bring notebooks and pencils and donate (Plate 33.1). The most important feast of the Jains is paryushan, a time of reflection, meditation and fasting (Plate 33.2). In India this feast takes place during the four month rainy season called caturmas. During this time, nuns and monks do not wander around, but stay at one place and give lectures to the lay people. In the diaspora, paryushan is also of great importance. During these eight days, many Jains are fasting, everybody according to his or her individual abilities. To celebrate paryushan, which takes place in August/September, they set up one or two big tents. Lay preachers and musicians from India are invited. There are lectures every morning and evening. Paryushan ends on the eighth day with the celebration of pratikraman, which takes three hours for the Deravasi and one and a half hour for the Sthanakvasi. After this ceremony people greet each other with Micchami Dukkadam, and all look forward to parna taking place the next day in the morning (Plate 33.3).
Shankheshvar Parshvanath Mandir In 1992, the Jains decided to build a Jain temple on the 4,000 m2 plot of land they had bought from a Belgium company years ago. In this year, they established an incorporated society called Jain Cultural Center Antwerp, abbreviated as J.C.C.A. Members of this society are thirteen men, who also form the temple committee. This team is responsible for the whole organization of the temple construction. This project is financed by donations of the Jain Community Antwerp. The temple is called Shankheshvar Parshvanath Mandir. Shankheshvar is a place of pilgrimage for the Jains and Parshvanath is the 23rd Tirthankara. The temple of the Jains is located amidst a residential area in Wilrijk, a district of Antwerp (Plates 33.4 and 33.5).
White marble is transported from Rajasthan to Antwerp by ship and from the port to the temple area by a big lorry (Plates 33.6 and 33.7).
Every year, people from India come to Antwerp for six months to build the temple. Most of them come from Rajasthan and few from Gujarat. They are no Jains. While most of the stonemasonry work is completed in India, there is still a lot of hard work to do for the people by hand, with hammer and bit or with the cutting machine (Plates 33.8 and 33.9). The temple built in Nagar style has three Shikhara. The biggest is the middle one (Plate 33.10). The temple, called Shankeshvar Parshvanath Mandir, was not built according to a model (Plate 33.11). Yet the cultural hall was built according to the example of the Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram in Agas. This building provides space for approximately 1,500 people (Plate 33.12).
