Dronagiri

A Bundelkhand siddhakshetra of some thirty temples on and below a low hill, counted among the ancient places of liberation.

Dronagiri is named as a nirvana site in several of the tradition’s own reference texts on liberation places — Pujyapada’s Nirvana Bhakti and Acharya Harishena’s Brihat Katha Kosh among them — as the place where the ascetic Muni Gurudatta attained liberation; his cave is still shown on the hill alongside the roughly three dozen temples that make up the complex.

Among the temples are a Choubisi shrine, holding images of all twenty-four Tirthankaras together, and a manastambha, the freestanding pillar Digambara sites raise before a principal shrine. Some sources give Dronagiri the epithet "Laghu Sammed Shikhar" — Sammed Shikhar in miniature — the same informal honorific a number of Digambara hill sites carry, in recognition of the same nirvana-site character rather than any claim to be the original.

Written for Jain Times. Corrections are welcome — see sources and licences.