The Ghar Derasar: The Shrine at Home, and the Home Without One

A ghar derasar is a shrine kept inside a Jain home: a small cabinet, an image, and a fixed place where the day begins. Millions of Jain families keep one. Millions of Jain families keep none, on principle, and this page is written for both. Nothing in a shrine acts on the household. Whatever it does, it does through the person standing in front of it, which is precisely why a home without an image is not a home without a practice.

Say the honest thing first. A very large part of the Jain community does not use images at all, and that is not laxity, poverty or drift. It is a doctrinal position with a five-hundred-year history and named acharyas behind it. A guide to home shrines written as though every Jain has one, or should want one, would be exactly the kind of flattening our mission page objects to. So this page has two halves, and the second half is not an appendix.

The word

Derasar is Gujarati for a Jain temple, and ghar derasar is the household one. In Hindi-speaking families the same thing is a ghar mandir. The Sanskrit terms in the older literature are griha chaitya and griha jinalaya, house-shrine and house-Jina-hall.

They all mean the same object: a shrine that belongs to a family rather than to a sangh, maintained by that family, and normally installed in a room or a corner used for nothing else.

Who keeps one, and who does not

This is the first thing to establish, because almost everything else on this page depends on which column a household is in.

The aniconic strand is not a fringe. Its history is datable and its reasoning is textual.

Lonka Shah, working in fifteenth-century Gujarat, was by tradition a scribe employed to copy manuscripts, and he concluded from the reading that image worship was not enjoined in the canonical texts he was copying. The movement that followed him is the origin of the aniconic Shvetambara line. In the seventeenth century a further reform under Lavaji produced the Sthanakvasi, so named because they worship in a sthanak, a hall, rather than in a temple. In 1760, Acharya Bhikshu separated from that line over questions of ascetic discipline and founded the Terapanth, which keeps a single acharya for the whole order. And on the Digambara side, Taran Svami (traditionally 1448 to 1515) founded the Taranapanth of Bundelkhand, whose shrines hold scriptures where an image would otherwise be.

Four separate movements, three centuries apart, arriving independently at the same conclusion. Whatever else it is, it is not an oversight.

What an image-keeping home holds

A ghar derasar is usually a wooden or marble cabinet with doors that close, kept on a raised platform, in a clean room, and typically not in a bedroom, a kitchen or against a bathroom wall.

Inside it, most commonly:

• A small Jina image, or the charan paduka, a pair of carved footprints, which many families prefer precisely because it carries fewer obligations.
• The parameshthi, sometimes as a Siddhachakra or Navpad yantra rather than as a figure.
• A set of the ashtamangala in brass or silver, on a small stand.
• A pat, the metal or wooden plate on which the sathiya is drawn in rice.
• The vessels: a small kalasha, a lamp, an incense stand, a bell in some households and none in others.

The images themselves differ by sect, and the difference is visible at a glance. A Digambara image is unclothed and unadorned, eyes lowered or closed, with nothing on the body. A Shvetambara Murtipujak image has inlaid eyes that meet yours, a shrivatsa on the chest, and is dressed and ornamented on occasion. Both are images of a Jina. They are making different statements about what a Jina looks like, and neither is a decorated or stripped version of the other.

What actually happens in front of it

Darshan is the minimum and the most common: standing before the image at the start of the day, with attention.

Dravya puja, material worship, is the fuller form and it differs by sect.

In Shvetambara Murtipujak practice the standard is the ashta-prakari puja, the eightfold worship, in two parts. Anga puja touches the image: water, sandal paste, flowers. Agra puja is offered before it: incense, lamp, unbroken rice, food and fruit. The rice is arranged as the sathiya with the three dots and the crescent above it.

In Digambara practice the order runs through abhisheka, the ceremonial bathing of the image, and then the offering of eight substances on a plate placed before it rather than on the image itself. The image is not dressed or ornamented.

Two details worth knowing because they are so often mangled in general accounts:

The mouth cloth is two different things. During puja, a Shvetambara Murtipujak worshipper ties an ashtapad or mukhkosh, a folded cloth, across the nose and mouth, so that the breath does not fall on the image. That is a puja garment. The muhpatti carried by Shvetambara laypeople during samayik and worn permanently across the mouth by Sthanakvasi and Terapanth ascetics is a different object with a different purpose. Seeing a cloth over a mouth tells you nothing until you know which one it is.

No ascetic performs dravya puja. Jain monks and nuns do not do the eightfold offering. Across the traditions, material worship is a householder’s practice, and an ascetic’s relation to a Jina image is bhava puja: chaityavandan, stuti, and the mental act. Whatever else that fact establishes, it establishes that the eightfold offering was never held to be the highest available form of the thing. It is the form appropriate to a person who has taken anuvratas rather than mahavratas, which is the argument our second mission is built on.

Before you install an image, read this

This is the part that enthusiasm skips, and it is the part that causes real distress later.

A fully consecrated image is not an ornament. In community practice, an image that has undergone pratishtha, with the eye-opening rite of anjan shalaka, carries an ongoing obligation of regular worship, and a family that installs one and then cannot keep it up is generally held to have created a problem rather than solved one. Households move, children leave, elders become unwell, and a shrine that goes unattended for years is a common and quiet source of guilt.

So the ordinary conservative advice in most sanghs is: keep it small, or keep footprints or a yantra rather than a figure, and ask your own acharya or sangh before installing anything consecrated. Conventions about permissible size and about what may be kept at home vary between traditions and between regions, and we are not going to print a number that we cannot source. Your own sangh can, and the answer they give you governs.

The home that keeps no image

Here is the second half, and it is not a consolation prize.

The aniconic traditions hold that the practices the canon actually prescribes are internal and available to anyone, anywhere, without an object. What a Sthanakvasi or Terapanth household keeps is not an emptier version of a ghar derasar. It is a schedule.

• Samayik. Forty-eight minutes of equanimity, at a fixed time, in a fixed place, seated on a mat kept for the purpose. This is the single most important thing in the house and it needs nothing on a shelf.
• The sthapanacharya. A small stand holding five cowrie shells, or a book, established at the start of samayik, pratikraman or swadhyay as the symbolic presence of the guru. It is a placeholder for a teacher rather than an object of worship, it is used across Shvetambara practice including Sthanakvasi, and it is the most direct answer to the question of what a home without a murti sets in front of itself.
• Pratikraman. Daily in the devout rhythm, fortnightly at Pakkhi, yearly at Samvatsari. The most characteristically Jain practice there is, and it involves no image at any point.
• Pachchakhan at the morning. The day’s dietary vow taken aloud on waking, which is a household practice needing nothing but a decision.
• Navkar japa on a navkarvali of 108 beads, and swadhyay, reading, which the tradition counts among the internal austerities.
• A clean corner kept for it. A mat, the beads, the sthapanaji, the books. Not decorated, and not nothing.

The doctrinal point underneath all of this is one the image traditions accept as readily as the aniconic ones. Bhava, the internal state, is what binds and sheds karma. Dravya, the material act, matters because of the bhava it produces and for no other reason. Jain karma theory puts bhava-bandha, the bondage of intention, before the bondage of the act. A shrine is an instrument. An instrument is not the work.

Which is exactly why our first mission argues for visible symbols without arguing that anyone must own one. The object is a reminder wearing the shape of a thing. A family that has found another way to place the reminder has done the thing that matters.

What no shrine does

Three limits, stated flatly, because a great deal of what circulates about home shrines quietly crosses them.

Nothing in the shrine acts on the household. Jainism has no creator, no judge and no power that intervenes in a case. A siddha is liberated, without body or relation to the world, and cannot receive a request. An arihanta has destroyed the karma that produces preference. There is no mechanism by which a petition reaches anybody and none by which a response returns. A shrine is not insurance, and a house without one is not exposed.

The devas are real and are not saviours. Jain cosmology is full of gods, and Indra himself attends every kalyanaka. They are also unliberated: beings inside samsara, working off their own karma, with lifespans that end and rebirths ahead of them. They are fellow travellers who happen to be further up a particular road, not authorities over yours.

The honest caveat. A great deal of real Jain practice is petitionary anyway. Padmavati, Ghantakarna Mahavir, Nakoda Bhairav and Manibhadra are venerated in enormous numbers, at home and at major shrines, for outcomes people badly want. That usage is real, it is old, it is widespread among devout families, and we are not going to sneer at it. It is also not what the doctrine says, and no Jain source we can name supports the transaction it implies. Both things are true at once, and a page that reported only one of them would be misleading you about your own community. The same caveat, in the same words, applies to the Navkar Mantra.

Ahimsa, and what is offered

Two practical notes that follow from the tradition’s own ethics rather than from a rule list.

Living matter. Preferences differ between and within sects about fresh flowers, green vegetables and other sachitta, living, offerings, with some households and some traditions preferring items that are prasuk, rendered non-living, and others using fresh flowers as standard. This is genuine variation in practice, not a settled rule, and your sangh’s usage governs.

The lamp and the incense. The deep and the dhoop of the eightfold puja involve fire, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise. The resolution it offers is the one it offers everywhere: this is householder’s practice, householders hold anuvratas rather than mahavratas, and the ascetic who holds the great vows performs no material puja at all. Note also that this site’s standing refusal of fire rituals concerns havan performed as a karmic remedy, which is a different thing entirely from a lamp lit in front of a Jina. Karma is not appeased by fire, or by anything else. It is shed, by the person who bound it.

Frequently asked questions

Related

• Jain Symbols Explained: the whole section
• The ashtamangala, drawn on the pat in rice
• The Jain flag: five colours, five salutations
• The 24 lanchhanas, emblem by emblem
• Samayik: forty-eight minutes of equanimity
• Pratikraman: the six avashyaks
• Navkar Mantra: five salutations that ask for nothing
• Our missions: why the symbols matter and why nobody is obliged

Sources. The sect table follows the standard descriptions of the four traditions. Lonka Shah in fifteenth-century Gujarat, the Sthanakvasi reform associated with Lavaji in the seventeenth century, the founding of the Terapanth by Acharya Bhikshu in 1760, and Taran Svami of the Digambara Taranapanth, traditionally dated 1448 to 1515, are as given in the standard reference literature on Jain sects; the account of Lonka Shah as a copyist who read the manuscripts he was copying is the tradition's own account of him and is given as such. The contents of a household shrine, the ashta-prakari puja in its anga and agra divisions, the Digambara abhisheka and the eight substances offered on a plate, and the visible iconographic differences between Digambara and Shvetambara images are described from ordinary practice in each tradition. The distinction between the puja mukhkosh and the muhpatti of samayik and of Sthanakvasi and Terapanth ascetics is a distinction of purpose and is stated as one. That ascetics do not perform dravya puja is standard across the traditions. The obligations attaching to a consecrated image, and the advice to keep a household image small, are community practice rather than a scriptural rule, and we print no size figure because we could not source one; your own sangh can. Vastu prescriptions are identified as Vastu and not as Jain doctrine. That bhava precedes and governs dravya, and that bhava-bandha precedes the bondage of the act, follows standard Jain karma theory as set out in the Tattvartha Sutra. The petitionary veneration of Padmavati, Ghantakarna Mahavir, Nakoda Bhairav and Manibhadra is reported as widespread practice, neither endorsed nor condemned, in the same terms used on our Navkar Mantra page. Corrections are seva: tell us.