Palitana and Shatrunjaya

Shatrunjaya carries close to nine hundred temples and no residents, and the second fact is the more revealing one.

The rule

Every pilgrim, every priest and every attendant descends before nightfall. The temples are locked and the hill is left to itself.

The reason given is not practical. The summit is understood as a dwelling of the divine, and human residence there would be a presumption, so the hill is used by day and vacated at dusk, every day, without exception.

The rule belongs to the trust and the tradition rather than to any law, and it has held for centuries.

The climb

More than three thousand five hundred steps. Pilgrims customarily make the ascent without eating, and many without drinking, and are expected to come down the same day.

Devout Jains aim to make the climb ninety-nine times in a lifetime, a practice called the navvanu jatra, undertaken over successive seasons.

Over four hundred thousand made the ascent in 2010.

Whose hill it is

Shatrunjaya is a Svetambara site. The Anandji Kalyanji Trust, a lay body founded in the seventeenth century by the Ahmedabad merchant Shantidas Zaveri, has administered it since about 1730.

That is characteristic of Jain institutional life and worth noticing: the great Jain sites are run by merchant trusts, not by monastic orders. Jain ascetics own nothing and cannot administer property, so the laity does it, and the laity in question has historically been mercantile and wealthy.

Digambaras maintain a single temple on the hill and assert no claim on the rest. Unlike Girnar or Sammed Shikharji, Shatrunjaya is not a site of inter-order dispute.

What is actually old

Tradition claims eleventh-century foundations and two images of that date survive. But very little of the standing fabric predates the twelfth century, and most is considerably later.

The hill was sacked and rebuilt repeatedly, by Delhi Sultanate forces in the fourteenth century among others, and what stands is the product of a community that kept rebuilding on the same ground.

The vegetarian town

In 2014 the town of Palitana below the hill prohibited the sale of meat, fish and eggs, following a hunger strike by Jain monks. It is described as the first legally vegetarian town in the world.

It is also a fair indication that this is a community which polices the conduct of the area around its sacred site, and does so successfully.

Shatrunjaya's hilltop holds more than eight hundred marble temples, and pilgrims are expected to reach and leave all of them within the same day.

A hilltop city of temples

More than eight hundred individually built marble temples and shrines cover the hilltop, constructed and added to by different patrons over many centuries rather than as a single planned complex, dedicated primarily to Rishabhanatha, known as Adinatha, the first Tirthankara in Jain tradition, whom the site's principal temple enshrines.

The climb and its rules

Reaching the temples requires a barefoot climb of roughly thirty-eight hundred steps, undertaken as an act of devotion consistent with Jain principles of physical discipline and non-attachment, and pilgrims commonly observe fasting or restricted eating before and during the ascent as part of the practice's spiritual seriousness.

Nobody stays overnight

As this entry's companion article notes, tradition and temple rules require that no one remain on the hill after nightfall, including temple staff, so the entire complex of hundreds of temples is deliberately left unattended each night, a practice tied to the belief that the mountain's sanctity should not be treated as ordinary inhabited ground even temporarily.