Jainism

Sravanabelgola was the one stop with no assigned reading. No Pollock, no Davis, no scholar to argue with on the bus. Just 614 steps cut into the granite of Vindhyagiri hill, and at the top, a 57-foot naked man who has been standing in exactly the same position since 981 CE.

The figure is Bahubali, and the tradition that carved him is Jainism — one of the oldest religions still practiced in the world, and the only one on the trip that looks at a colossus and reads it as a lesson in letting go. To understand why a thousand-year-old monument is naked, why vines are carved climbing its legs, and why more than a million people gathered in 2018 — the year before the trip reached the hill — to pour milk over its head, the place to start is what the religion actually believes.

Jainism emerged in the Gangetic plain of northern India by at least the 6th century BCE, part of the same non-Vedic “śramaṇa” (renouncer) world that produced Buddhism. Its central claim is austere and self-reliant: there is no creator god, no grace, no cosmic rescue. The universe is eternal and self-regulating, populated by an infinite number of individual souls, each of which can reach liberation entirely through its own effort — by shedding the karmic matter that weighs it down through right knowledge, right conduct, and radical discipline.

Its reference points are the twenty-four Tirthankaras— “ford-makers,” the ones who build the crossing over the river of rebirth. The twenty-fourth and most recent was Vardhamana, called Mahavira (“great hero”), traditionally dated to 599–527 BCE, though scholars often place him a generation or two later.^[1] He did not found Jainism so much as radicalize an already-old tradition: renounced his family at thirty, practiced extreme asceticism for twelve years, attained omniscience, taught for thirty more, and died at Pavapuri.

Three commitments hold the whole thing together. Ahimsa — non-violence pushed to its absolute limit: not merely refusing to kill but refusing to harm any living being, down to the microorganisms in water and air. Monks sweep the ground before they step and strain what they drink. This is not metaphor; it is ontology — every soul, however small, can suffer. Anekantavada— the doctrine of many-sidedness: reality is too complex to be captured from any single standpoint, an unusually formal humility about one’s own certainty. And aparigraha — non-possession, non-attachment, which for the most advanced ascetics extends even to clothing.

That last point is why the man on the hill is naked. By the early centuries CE the tradition had split into two branches: the Digambara(“sky-clad”), whose most advanced monks wear nothing as the final seal of renunciation, and the Śvetāmbara(“white-clad”), who wear simple white cloth. The Deccan south became Digambara country. Bahubali’s nakedness is not a stylistic choice or an absence of clothing the sculptor forgot to add. It is the doctrine, carved at 57 feet.

Bahubali is not himself a Tirthankara. He is the son of the first one, Rishabhanatha, and his story is the whole theology in miniature. He and his brother Bharata fought for their father’s kingdom; Bahubali won every contest. And then, at the moment of victory, he saw the emptiness of what he had been fighting for, set the kingdom down, and walked into the forest to meditate. He stood so long, so completely still, that vines (vanamala) grew up his legs and arms, anthills rose at his feet, and snakes moved through the grass around him.

Look closely at the statue at Sravanabelgola and those details are all there, carved into the granite: the vines climbing the calves, the anthills at the ankles, the serpents. They are not damage and they are not decoration. They are the biography, made literal — the figure stands so still that the natural world grows over and around it, and the stone records what a body looks like once it stops behaving like a body. He stands in kayotsarga, which translates, precisely, as “abandoning the body.”

It was commissioned in 981 CE by Chavundaraya, a general and minister of the Western Ganga dynasty — and notably not by a king. It is often called the tallest free-standing monolithic statue in the world; that superlative is hard to verify comparatively, but the scale is not in doubt.^[2] What is striking is what the scale is for. Monumental architecture almost always projects the power of the patron who builds it. This projects the power of giving everything up.

Roughly every twelve years — the interval is set by the community and the religious calendar, not by a strict rule — the monolith is the site of the Mahamastakabhisheka, the “great head-anointing.” ^[3] A scaffold is built up and over the 57-foot figure, and from the top priests pour milk, then curds, ghee, saffron water, sandalwood, vermilion, gold coins, and flowers, so that the offering cascades down the head and the whole body to the feet. The most recent was in 2018, drawing an estimated million-plus pilgrims — a year before the trip reached the hill.

The permanent monument and the periodic ceremony need each other. For most of the dozen years the figure is pure stillness — a body that refuses to move while empires, weather, and tourists pass. And then for a few days it is the opposite: drenched, surrounded, alive with offering. There is a tension here worth sitting with. Strict Digambara theology holds that a liberated being has left the world entirely and cannot be petitioned — prayer to Bahubali is, technically, futile. And yet the Mahamastakabhisheka looks, from outside, like one of the largest acts of devotion on earth. The image asks for nothing; a million people come to give to it anyway.

The trip’s other Jain encounter was quieter and more telling. At Badami, four temples are cut into the red sandstone cliff above the lake. Caves 1 through 3 are Hindu — Shiva, Vishnu in his cosmic forms. Cave 4, the northernmost and smallest, is Jain: a seated Mahavira (or, by some readings, the first Tirthankara Rishabhanatha) in the inner shrine, and rows of identical Tirthankara figures carved across the pillars and walls.^[4]

That adjacency is the entire course in one cliff face. The same Chalukya dynasty — not itself Jain — paid for all four caves; the same workshops, in all likelihood, moved from one to the next, adapting their vocabulary as the theology changed. The Hindu caves are full of narrative drama: Vishnu striding across the universe, the boar lifting the earth. The Jain cave suppresses drama almost entirely in favor of repetition — Tirthankara after Tirthankara, near-identical, each having walked the same path alone. From outside it can read as monotonous. From inside it is a radical claim: enlightenment looks the same for everyone, there is no special revelation, no unique divine favor, only the same posture, held.

The throughline of the course was that every place is a palimpsest — that purity is a myth, and translation the constant. Davis’s Lives of Indian Images taught us to read a sculpture as something with a biography: made, consecrated, worshipped, looted, carried off, collected, re-displayed, its meaning rewritten with every owner. Almost every monument on the trip wore those rewrites openly — a temple renamed, a fort re-flagged, a deity carried to a rival capital.

Bahubali is the partial exception, and the exception is instructive. The figure has never been looted, moved, or absorbed into another tradition’s program. The community that anoints it today is, by lineage, the same one that commissioned it a thousand years ago. It is one of the least-translated objects we saw — and the reason is not magic but continuity: an organized community with unbroken institutional memory, and the simple brute fact that a 57-foot naked ascetic is almost impossible to repurpose into anyone else’s story. The palimpsest model still holds; this image just has a biography with fewer interruptions.

It is the one monument on the trip whose whole argument is that the body holding it up does not matter.

And that is the thing I keep returning to. On the Jain time-scale — cosmic cycles measured in billions of years, twenty-four Tirthankaras per descending age — a thousand-year-old statue is not ancient. It is recent. The figure’s permanence is the point and also the smallest possible unit of the point: a body that would not move, in a tradition that teaches that the body is exactly what keeps every one of us from being free. We climbed 614 steps to stand at the feet of a man who would have told us, if he could, that the climb and the feet and the standing were all beside the point.

Honestly: Jainism was the thinnest tradition on my shelf. There was no Jain text in the seventeen books I carried — no canonical translation, no Jain philosophy. The closest frameworks were Davis on the lives of images and Pollock on the cosmopolitan world that a Jain general’s Sanskrit inscription was participating in (Jain poets, it’s worth knowing, were among the earliest great writers in Kannada). The absence is its own small lesson: the syllabus was built around the Hindu and Islamic Deccan, and Jainism arrived as pure encounter, which is maybe the right way to meet a tradition whose central monument refuses to explain itself.