Temple of Satrunjaya

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 55

THE SATRUNJAYA MAHATMYA
ike other sects, the Jainas have their tirthas or holy places which
they visit for worship at stated periods, in vast pilgrim bands called Sanghas, numbering many thousands, from Gujarat, Marwad, Gangetic India, and elsewhere. They enumerate five great tirthas: Satrunjaya, Samet Sikhar or Mount Parsvanatha in Bihar, Arbuda or Abu in Sirohi, Girnar in Saurashtra, and Chandragiri in the Himalayas. At these places we naturally expect the oldest Jaina remains, and "according to some Jaina authorities”, says Dr. Wilson, “Jaina temples were first built in the year 882 Virabda, equivalent to A.D. 313”.92 At Girnar we have probably their oldest existing remains, but none of them approach to this antiquity, and few anywhere date earlier than the eleventh or twelfth century of our era.
Satrunjaya or Satrunji is a solitary mountain lying to the south of the town of Palitana and rising perhaps 2,000 thousand feet above the sea level. Its summit is covered with temples and from their extent and celebrity, they are perhaps second in interest to none elsewhere. Like other tirthas it has its māhātmya or legend, and the Satrunjaya Māhātmya in glorification of the Hill as a place of pilgrimage, claims to be the oldest Jaina document we possess, dating as far back as A.D. 420, according to some, and according to Weber, in A.D. 598.93 It was composed by Dhanesvara at Valabhi, by command, he says, of Siladitya, king of Saurashtra. But the author would have us believe his authorities were of the remotest antiquity, for he begins by telling that at the request of Rsabhanatha, Pundarika, the leader of his gana (Ganadhipa) had long ago composed a māhātmya of Satrunjaya in 100,000 padas; and that Sudharma, the leader of Vira's gana, by his master's direction, made an abstract of it in 24,000 verses, from which Dhanesvara, the humiliator
92
Jour. Bomb. Br. R. As. Soc., Vol. III. pt. ii. p. 88. We ought here to adopt the Gujarat epoch-527 B.C. as the era of Vira, so that this becomes 355 A.D., for the Tapa Jaina Pattavali relates that Jaina temples were first built in the year 882 after Vira or 412 Sambat (i.e. 355 A.D.) during the spiritual government of the Acarya Manatunga Suri or Manadeva Suri. See Col. Miles, Trans. R. Asiat. Soc., Vol. III. p. 347. Manadeva Suri is the 19th and Manatunga Suri the 20th in the list appended to Dr. Wilson's MS. of the Kalpa Sutra; in Dr. Stevenson's list, the 19th is only styled Mana-Kalpa Sutra, p. 102. Of course this date must depend on that of Mahavira's death, to which it professes to be 947 years subsequent, or 477 after the era of Vikrama.
6. 347. Man, Wilson's Kalpa Sutra, havira's
08