Panchasara Parshvanath Temple

The principal Jain temple of Patan, once the Solanki capital of Anhilwad, tradition connecting its founding to the city’s own.

Tradition dates both the city and the temple to the same act: Vanraj Chavda, founder of the Chavda dynasty and of Anhilwad Patan itself around 746 CE, is said to have built the temple in honour of his guru, Acharya Shilagunasuri, and to have installed within it an image of Parshvanatha carried from Panchasar, the village that had been his own ancestors’ capital before Patan existed. The temple’s name, and the deity’s epithet, both preserve that older place rather than the new city built around it.

What stands today is not the eighth-century original: the temple was destroyed during the era of Muslim conquest in the region and rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in white marble with the kind of sophisticated carving Gujarat’s temple-building tradition sustained across that rebuilding — a founding legend and a physical structure separated by the better part of a millennium, which is true of a great many of the oldest sites in this directory even where the connection to the founding story is kept as plainly as it is here.

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