A Jain temple, in the usage of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and the characteristic place of worship of the Svetambara community in western India. The word is from a Gujarati form meaning the house of the image.
It houses images of the tirthankaras, the principal one enshrined in the inner sanctum with others ranged around it. Worshippers bathe before entering, remove leather, and perform puja: bathing the image, anointing it with sandal paste, offering rice, flowers, fruit, incense and a lamp. Svetambara images are ordinarily shown with inlaid eyes and are adorned with cloth and ornament.
What is being done requires care to describe, because the tradition's own account of it differs from what the actions suggest. Jainism holds that the tirthankaras are liberated, that liberated beings do not act, and that no being grants anything to anyone. The image therefore receives nothing and answers nothing, and Jain doctrinal writing is emphatic on the point. The worship is explained as the contemplation of qualities the worshipper intends to acquire, with the benefit falling entirely on the worshipper. Whether ordinary practice always matches that account is a question Jains themselves debate.
The great western Indian temple complexes, Dilwara at Mount Abu, Ranakpur, the temple cities of Shatrunjaya and Girnar, are derasars at the largest scale, built with mercantile wealth and famous for marble carving of extraordinary fineness. Jains also maintain a domestic version, the griha derasar, a shrine within the house.
Facts
Organisation
Category of Structure Distinguishing FeatureHouses images of the tirthankaras in the inner sanctum 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Learn More
The Image Temple of the Western Svetambaras
The derasar is the Jain temple in the usage of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and it is the characteristic place of worship of the image-venerating Svetambara community of western India.
Worship before the image
A derasar houses consecrated images of the Tirthankaras, and the daily worship performed there, the puja, includes the bathing, anointing and honouring of the image with offerings of rice, flowers and lamps. The Svetambara image is depicted with inlaid eyes and often adorned, a point on which the tradition differs visibly from the Digambara. The temples of the region are famous for their marble carving, the great temple-cities of Mount Abu and Palitana being the supreme examples, where hundreds of shrines cover a sacred hill.
An image tradition among Jains
The derasar belongs to one side of an old division within Jainism over the place of images. The Svetambara Murtipujaka tradition, whose temple it is, holds image worship central, against the Sthanakvasi and Terapanthi reform traditions that reject it, so the existence and the furnishing of the derasar are themselves a position in an internal Jain argument. The temple is maintained by the lay community, whose gifts endow it, and the great pilgrimage temples draw Jains from across India and the diaspora to a form of worship that the aniconic Jain reformers deliberately set aside.
The Adorned Image That Defines the Western Temple
The derasar's defining feature is not its architecture alone but the specific treatment of the images inside it, a doctrinal choice rather than a decorative one. Svetambara belief holds that the tirthankaras, though liberated souls, are properly shown retaining ordinary human features, so derasar images are given inlaid or painted eyes, dressed in cloth, and adorned with jewellery that is changed and cared for by attendants much as a living figure might be dressed, in sharp contrast to the unadorned images of the Digambara tradition across the peninsula. This approach to image worship reached its most elaborate architectural expression in western India over several centuries.
The Dilwara temples on Mount Abu, built in white marble between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries under Chaulukya era patronage, are still cited as the standard against which later Svetambara temple carving is measured, their ceilings carved so finely that the marble reads as lace rather than stone. The Ranakpur temple in Rajasthan, raised in the fifteenth century with over a thousand carved pillars said to be no two alike, extended the same tradition of lavish, image centred temple building that the derasar form was built to house.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Derasar is the Gujarati word used mainly by Svetambara communities.
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