Shatrunjaya, a Glorious Sacred City on the Crest of a Mountain
Two thousand years ago in India, the legend goes, a Jain priest who could fly, and a disciple who could create gold founded a glorious sacred city on the crest of a mountain. They called it Shatrunjaya (place of victory). Now it is the Jains holiest pilgrimage site, and every year believers come for a day, a week or even months. To most Jains, these pilgrimages to Shatrunjaya, near Palitana in the western state of Gujarat, are sacred obligations. In seeming contrast to their workaday lives as India’s premier bankers and businessmen, the country’s two million Jains follow an intensely spiritual tradition. Jainism is one of India’s ancient religions, dating from the 6th century B.C., and adherents believe life continues eternally in successive reincarnations. Through good acts, like pilgrimages to worship the 24 tirthankars (gods) of Shatrunjaya who guide their soul’s advancement, they seek to make each reincarnation bring them closer to nirvana.
Curiously, Shatrunjaya is itself a triumph of reincarnation. After its early temples were destroyed by Muslim invaders in the 14th and 15th centuries, the site was completely rebuilt over the next 400 years, with an explosion of new construction in the early decades of the 1800s. When discovered in 1840 by James Fergusson, a Scottish export merchant who was to become the father of Indian architectural history, Shatrunjaya was a sight to make the heart surge, a shimmering city of tall spires rising from more than 850 stone temples. For Fergusson it was an unimaginable find. Here was architecture that not only resembled European Gothic but, he declared, rivaled it, and builders whose methods revealed the “processes by which cathedrals were produced in the Middle Ages.” Shatrunjaya has nine tunks in all, most named for their patrons. For example, one honors a 19th century businessman with a problem, his banker, who years earlier had personally covered a fabulously large overdrawn check for him, refused to accept any reimbursement. So, in the Jain tradition of endowing temples (“The Jains put their money into stone,” the saying goes), the businessman solved the problem by putting the money into a tunk.
Visiting Shatrunjaya more than a century later was a way to live out a childhood romance with Fergusson’s adventures. The climb to Shatrunjaya takes about 90 minutes, an assault of 3,282 stone steps that rise about 600 meters. Although some people ride up on sedan chairs, most prefer to make the trip by foot, luckily, it’s a comfortable ascent. Walking sticks, nearly essential are available for hire. The steps divide into broad, well-maintained staircases with low, easy risers. Interspersed flat landscaped paths offer relief from climbing, and there are also resting spots along the way.
