Mahudi

A much-visited Gujarat shrine, known less for its Tirthankara image than for the Ghantakarna Mahavir it also houses.

The temple is comparatively recent as Gujarat tirthas go: Acharya Buddhisagarsuri, a Svetambara reformist monk with a substantial following in the early twentieth century, laid its foundation in 1916 on land donated for the purpose, and it opened the following year. The principal image, a twenty-two-inch marble Padmaprabhu, sixth of the Tirthankaras, shares the complex with a separate shrine that draws the larger crowd.

That second shrine is to Ghantakarna Mahavir, one of the fifty-two viras — protector deities — recognised in Svetambara practice, said to have been a Kshatriya king named Tungabhadra in an earlier birth and now invoked as a guardian of the less fortunate. His worship at Mahudi, and the requests for worldly help that come with it, sit uneasily with a tradition centred on renunciation, and the objection is as long-standing within the community as the popularity of the practice itself.

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