The four directions

Meru is the fixed point. East is pūrva, south dakṣiṇa, west paścima, north uttara. Dakṣiṇa also means right-hand, because the frame assumes a person facing the rising sun, and that is the older sense of the word.

Every continent's rim wall carries four gates at the four cardinal points, and they always bear the same four names: Vijaya east, Vaijayanta south, Jayanta west, Aparājita north. They all mean some form of victory, and they repeat outward through the whole middle world.

The geography is built on this frame and the names admit it. Uttarakuru is the kuru of the north; Devakuru lies south of Meru. Sītā runs east from Meru to the sea and Sītodā runs west. On Jambūdvīpa the seven bands stack from Bharat Kṣetra in the south to Airāvat Kṣetra in the north, and the six mountains run east to west across them. Every one of the fourteen rivers is defined by which way it turns.

East is a slightly stranger idea here than it looks. Two suns circle Meru rather than one sun crossing a sky, so at any moment east means the quarter where a sun is currently rising for that part of the continent. Past Mānuṣottara the lights do not move at all, and direction there stops producing days.

The intermediate bearings do real work too. The 56 Antardvīpas sit in the four intermediate quadrants of the salt ocean, the four The four Gajadanta tusk-mountains run to Meru on intermediate lines, and the four consecration slabs on Meru's summit are placed one to each cardinal point, each serving the Tīrthaṅkaras of the region that lies that way.