About this encyclopedia
An illustrated encyclopedia of the Jain tradition, built on one rule: every figure here should be traceable to a text, and where it is not, the page says so.
The Jain cosmos is described in the āgamas and their commentaries in extraordinary numerical detail — the width of a continent, the height of a mountain, the depth of a river at its mouth, the lifespan of a god. Most retellings round those figures off or quietly fill in the ones the texts leave blank. This encyclopedia does neither.
It is made of two halves that share one body of data: an interactive atlas of nested maps, and a written page for every place, unit, person and idea in it.
How it is made
- The reckoning is declared
- This encyclopedia follows the Śvetāmbara reckoning. Where the Digambara tradition gives a different figure — sixteen kalpa heavens rather than twelve, ninety-six antardvīpas rather than fifty-six — the difference is stated rather than silently resolved.
- Nothing is invented
- Only one of the thirty-two vijayas has a capital named here, because that is the only one that could be confirmed. Only two of a Cakravartin's fourteen ratnas carry a size, because the text states only two. Where a name or a measure is not recorded, the page prints nothing and says that it is not recorded.
- Sources are named where they differ
- Where the tradition itself disagrees, both readings are given with their sources. The tributaries of the Sītā are five lakh thirty-two thousand in the Jambūdvīpaprajñapti, 5,32,038 in later reckonings, and 1,12,000 in the Digambara Sarvārthasiddhi. All three are printed.
- The yojana is not converted
- Cosmological distances use the pramāṇa yojana, five hundred times the utsedha yojana used for bodies and buildings. No conversion to kilometres or miles appears anywhere on this site, because no such conversion is meaningful.
- The arithmetic is checked
- The figures interlock: the seven regions of Jambūdvīpa in the proportion 1:2:4:8:16:32:64 and back down, the eight and a half million hells, the widths of the rings doubling outward. Every one of those sums is asserted by an automated check before the site is published, so a typo in one figure fails the build rather than reaching a reader.
Corrections
If a figure here contradicts a source you have, that is worth knowing and worth fixing. The contact page takes corrections with the source cited, and they are acted on. Contact.
Using this material
The prose, the maps and the compilation on this site are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may quote, translate, adapt and redistribute any of it, for any purpose including commercial, provided you credit The Jain Encyclopedia and link back. The underlying scriptural tradition belongs to no one.
For machines
This site is static HTML that reads without JavaScript. A curated index for language models is served at /llms.txt, the full text of every entry at /llms-full.txt, and every page has a Markdown twin at the same address with .md appended.