heritage/moodbidri.jpg · 1200×800Moodbidri — 'eastern bamboo' in Kannada — grew into the greatest Jain town of coastal Karnataka between the 14th and 16th centuries, under the Chowta rulers and the Bhattarakas of its matha. Eighteen basadis stand within a short walk of one another, which is why the town is called the Jaina Kashi of the South. The oldest, Guru Basadi, is traditionally dated to 714 CE and enshrines a tall black-stone Parshvanatha.
The Saavira Kambada Basadi, or Thousand-Pillar Temple, was begun in 1430 under the local chief Devaraya Wodeyar and took some thirty years to finish. Its granite pillars are famously all different, and its tiered wooden roofs, copper-sheathed and deeply eaved against the coastal rain, give it a look found nowhere else in Jain architecture. Inside stands an eight-foot image of Chandranatha — Chandraprabha, the eighth Tirthankara. A 50-foot manastambha, raised by Queen Nagala Devi of Karkala, stands before it.
Moodbidri's greatest treasure is not stone. The palm-leaf copies of the Dhavala, Jayadhavala and Mahadhavala — the vast commentaries on the Shatkhandagama, the oldest surviving Digambara scripture — were brought here for safety and kept in the Siddhanta Basadi within Guru Basadi. Scholars rediscovered them in the nineteenth century; their publication from 1939 onward reopened the earliest layer of the Digambara canon to modern study. Accounts differ on when and from where the manuscripts were carried to Moodbidri.
