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Located at a distance of 2 and a half kilometres from Mt. Abu and the nearest airport being Udaipur at 185km and Abu road being the nearest
railway station at 29km, Dilwara temples certainly does not boast of ‘convenient’ accessibility.
However, its not a bottle necked location as well, being well connected through road transport.
The exquisite architecture of the Dilwara temples is breathtakingly beautiful, esp.
The luminous and translucent marble works, which is rare to be found anywhere else. |
Though one can be blamed of audacity for comparing or even considering it architecturally superior to the Taj Mahal, its true that several critics and scholars consider it architecturally superior to the Taj.
The Dilwara Jain temple was built between 11th and 13th century during the pinnacle of Jainism.
Since most followers of the religion were from wealthy business families, they expressed their devotion by contributing large sums of money to the saints (tirthankars) for construction of temples.
Most of them are precious storehouses of rare manuscripts and documents of history.
Chiselling was one of the special skills in which they had gained significant expertise as is evident from the ‘marvellous’ carvings on the stones itself, which were used to build the temple. |
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There rarely is any architecture in the world where crafts, artistry and poeticism meet in such pleasant and stark combination.
The Myth:-According to Hindu mythology Nandini, the holy cow of the veneravle sage Vashisth fell on a gorge. Saint Vashisth, in order to avoid further mishaps, asked his youngest son Himalaya to fill the chasm and Himalaya took assistance from the mighty snake Arbud and hence the name Mt. Arbud.
Of the four temples at Dilwara, i.e. Luna Vashi temple, the Adinath temple, the Parshvanath temple and the Vimal Vashi temple- Luna Vashi and Vimal Vashi are considered superior and finest examples of craftsmanship and architectural artistry.
An example of the unique blending of artistry and poeticism is the lady that is shown to emerge from her bath and water droplets are shown to fall and a swan drinking the droplets.
Conclusion:-While most people will blame us of audacity for comparing the Dilwara Jain temple with the Taj Mahal, there will be others who are open to facts no matter how rude or un-canonical that might seem. As for me this is not about deciding which is superior; it is about witnessing something that defines a class of its own in ancient architectural feats.
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