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Is this how Budhism and Jainism were destroyed in India by Hindoos?

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Is this how Budhism and Jainism were destroyed in India by Hindoos? Empty Is this how Budhism and Jainism were destroyed in India by Hindoos?

Post by Guest Sun Dec 25, 2016 6:29 pm

One of the most telling phenomena, however, was the reuse of Jaina shrines by Virashaivas, a movement born in the 12th century. Julia Hegewald and Subrata Mitra in their paper, The Past in the Present: Temple Conversions in Karnataka and Appropriation and Re-use in Orissa, show how the Megudi temple in Karnataka’s Hallur, a Digambara Jaina shrine built between the 7th century CE and the 9th century CE, was converted into a Virashaiva shrine. The conversion involved uprooting the Jina Parsvanatha idol from the sanctum sanctorum, smearing it with sacred Virashaiva ash and placing it next to a pillar in the central aisle of the temple. In its stead, a stone Shivling was placed and outside the temple sat Shiva’s vahana (vehicle), the bull Nandi. The uprooted Jina idol was not removed from the temple altogether but retained and placed in the main access route to the sanctum sanctorum so that it could be seen by every devotee entering the temple.

The idea was to send a “strong message of intrusion and desecration and would cause great anxiety to Jaina devotees… used to venerating this as one of the most sacred objects of the temple before its conversion”. This message was reinforced by mutilating the sculptures adorning the temple’s entrance even as other wall sculptures inside the shrine were left untouched. Converting a Jaina temple and using the Jina idol as a war trophy was necessary to demonstrate the “strength and vigour” of the newly found Virashaiva movement, in a terrain that had hitherto been dominated by the Jaina elite.

http://scroll.in/article/823917/long-before-the-babri-masjid-architectural-reuse-was-an-intrinsic-part-of-indian-history

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