Sthanak

The sthanak is the plain hall used by the Sthanakvasi Jains, and it is best defined by an absence: there is no image in it.

Worship without an image

The Sthanakvasi are the Svetambara reform tradition that rejects image worship, holding that the veneration of consecrated images has no warrant in the earliest teaching, and their place of assembly reflects the conviction directly. The sthanak is a simple hall for prayer, recitation, meditation and the hearing of ascetics, containing no shrine and no image to be bathed or adorned, so that devotion is directed to the qualities of the liberated soul rather than to a represented form. The austerity of the building is the doctrine made architecture.

A reform within a reform

The tradition arose from a series of aniconic reform movements within Svetambara Jainism from the fifteenth century onward, of which the Sthanakvasi and the later Terapanthi are the principal survivors, set against the image-worshipping Murtipujaka majority whose temple is the derasar. The Sthanakvasi are also marked by the mouth-cloth, the muhapatti, worn permanently by their ascetics, a further sign of a tradition that has pressed the Jain principles of non-violence and non-attachment toward their strictest expression. The sthanak thus stands within Jainism as the deliberate counterpart to the ornate temple, worship stripped of the image the reformers judged a later accretion.

The sthanak is what a temple looks like once a community has decided that image worship itself was the problem, and the Sthanakvasi tradition that built these halls emerged from the Svetambara fold specifically to make that argument. The reform built on an earlier questioning of image worship associated with the fifteenth century figure Lonka Shah, who first argued that veneration of physical images had no basis in the scriptures the tradition itself accepted as authoritative, and the Sthanakvasis carried that argument to its practical conclusion from the seventeenth century onward by refusing to build temples with images at all.

A sthanak accordingly contains nothing to venerate: no image, no altar, no shrine, only an open hall used for scripture reading, meditation and direct contact with the wandering monastics whose visits are the community's central religious event, replacing image devotion with the presence of a living ascetic teacher instead. Every feature the derasar and basadi elaborate, statuary, ornament, a shrine at the architectural centre of the building, the sthanak omits by design, making the plainness of the hall itself the clearest possible statement of the reform's central claim, that true worship required no image standing between a devotee and the teaching.