heritage/champapuri.jpg · 1200×800Champa, capital of the Anga mahajanapada, stood where Nathnagar in Bhagalpur now lies. Jain tradition holds that Vasupujya, the twelfth Tirthankara, passed all five of his kalyanakas here — conception, birth, renunciation, omniscience and liberation — a claim no other site makes for a single Tirthankara. Because he was liberated here, Champapuri is counted a siddhakshetra, and his nirvana is remembered on the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight of Ashadha.
Excavation has shown a substantial city here in the Northern Black Polished Ware period, roughly 700 to 200 BCE, with a rampart and a moat around it. Champa appears constantly in early Jain and Buddhist literature as a great river port and trading city. Chandanbala, who became the foremost of Mahavira's nuns, was a princess of this city, and Mahavira himself is said to have spent his third and twelfth rainy seasons at Champa.
The tirtha today is a walled complex of about twelve temples at Nathnagar, six kilometres from Bhagalpur railway station, with dharamshalas for pilgrims. The principal Digambara temple enshrines a white image of Vasupujya roughly a foot and a half high, seated in padmasana, with panels around it showing the five kalyanakas. A thirty-one-foot standing statue of Vasupujya was installed in 2014. Munis such as Dharmaghosha and Padmaratha are also remembered as liberated here.
