The central room of the temple. There was a lot going on here. There were women sitting on the floor in front of small wooden tables where they had made intricate and hugely time consuming designs from rice. When one woman got up, another would take her place, sweep the first woman’s designs away and start again. People were chanting in prayer, ringing bells and gongs, anointing the statues with sandalwood paste, and making various gestures I didn’t understand.
The Jains are a branch of Hindus with many of the same stories and gods but in addition, they have another intricate cosmology of martyrs and saints and gods. Like the history and the language and the geography and and and, I didn’t get it all quite straight…