A Reform That Made Emptiness the Point

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.