Vallimalai Jain Beds

A hill outside Vellore carrying Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and rock-cut beds where Jain ascetics are held to have lived, alongside a later-built shrine.

The natural caverns on this hill were an ascetic dwelling long before any temple was built here — the rock-cut "beds," shallow depressions worked into the stone floor, are what a wandering Digambara monk needed and little more, and Tamil Nadu carries a number of these sites from roughly the same early centuries, this one and the beds at Kazhugumalai among the better documented.

Five inscriptions here, in Tamil, Grantha and Kannada script, are attributed to the Western Ganga king Rachamalla II, whose patronage is generally credited with the built shrine that was added to the site by the late ninth century — carvings of Tirthankaras, yakshis and the panchaparameshthi, the five supreme beings of Jain devotion, among its subjects. The inscriptions and the caverns are older than the built temple by a wide margin, which is the useful way to read a site like this: not one moment of construction, but an ascetic dwelling that only later acquired a shrine.

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