Jain tradition draws its universe as a body: the loka-purusha, a colossal figure standing with feet apart and arms akimbo, and the picture is more precise than it looks. The lower world, seven tiers of hell-lands stacked like inverted umbrellas, forms the legs, widening downward, roomier the darker they get. The middle world, thin as a waist, holds the concentric island-continents and ring-oceans centered on Mount Meru, with Jambudvipa, our continent, at the very center; only here, in a narrow zone, can human beings be born, act freely and attain liberation. The upper world swells through the chest and shoulders in tiers of paired heavens, narrowing again toward the neck, and at the crown sits the crescent Siddhashila, the abode of the liberated.
Around the whole figure lies the aloka, pure empty space where nothing, not even a god, can pass. The diagram, painted for centuries in manuscripts and temple hangings, is a teaching instrument: it shows a universe that is finite in extent yet eternal in duration, dense with beings at every level, and shaped, not accidentally, like the human form, because the human station at its waist is the only place from which its summit can be reached. Cosmology and soteriology are the same picture; a Jain looking at the cosmic man is looking at a map whose only meaningful route runs from the middle to the crown.