The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.s2.88

v2.c16.s2.88

This Jain establishment is left in charge of a Brāhman of Bhuvaneśvara, who keeps it very carefully swept and clean, but his duties as a priest are of the ligthest. There is no daily service, and feasts occur only twice a year, once on the thirteenth [36] of the moon in the month of Chaitra when a large number of the Oswāl merchants of Cuttack, Puri and other neighbouring places assemble to pay their respects to Mahāvīra, the last of the twenty-four Jinas, and celebrate the anniversary of his brith day;³⁸ and again on the 5th of the wane in the month of August, when another feast of importance, the Parjusana, or reading of the *Kalpa Sūtra*, is observed.³⁹ Travellers from distant parts of India also visit the place from time to time, and on all such occasions, the Brahman priest is in attendance to perform the rites of a heterodox faith, and thereby earn a precarious and scanty living. It should be added, however, that the Jain ritual is of the simplest, and the worshippers generally go through it themselves without the intervention of priests, and the resident priest’s duties are more that of a sexton than those of a clergyman. Mr. Stirling states that “all round the Jain temples are strewed a quantity of images of the Nirvānas or naked figures worshipped by the Jain sect, executed chiefly in the grey chlorite slate rock”;⁴⁰ but I clould find no trace of these; probably they had been removed by travellers and the people of the neighbourhood as objects of curiosity, or as images of gods to be worshipped in their private dwellings. Some of the loose figures in the galleries above noted are probably a part of those that in Stirling’s time were lying about uncared-for.