Nandīśvara-dvīpa

Count the continents outward — Jambūdvīpa, Dhātakīkhaṇḍa, Puṣkaravara, Vāruṇīvara, Kṣīravara, Ghṛtavara, Ikṣuvara — and Nandīśvara is the eighth. Counting the oceans as well it is the fifteenth ring, which is why some accounts call it the fifteenth. Both are right.

Its width follows from the one rule that governs the whole middle world: each ring is twice the width of the one before. Thirteen doublings from the salt sea gives 1,63,84,00,000 yojana — and that is the figure the sūtra states, arrived at independently. Everything inside it, Jambūdvīpa and thirteen rings together, reaches a radius of 1,63,82,50,000. The band is wider than the entire radius of the world it encircles.

It is a garden and nothing else. No regions, no lands of action, no rivers to speak of, no turning wheel of time — past Mānuṣottara the suns and moons hang still, so there is no day here, no month and no year. What it has is four black mountains, sixteen white ones, thirty-two of jewel, and on every one of the fifty-two an eternal temple.

When the gods come is fixed. Three times a year, at the same points every year: the eight days running from the eighth of the bright fortnight to the full moon — aṣṭamī to pūrṇimā — in Kārtika, Phālguna and Āṣāḍha. All four classes make the journey, Bhavanavāsī, Vyantara, Jyotiṣka and Vaimānika, with their retinues and their Indras at the head. Scripture gives one more occasion: after a Tīrthaṅkara's kalyāṇaka, when Śakra and the rest keep an eight-day festival at these shrines like the birth-festival.

Why they bother is the part usually left out. A god cannot be liberated while a god. Liberation happens only from the human world, inside Mānuṣottara — and the gods know this. So the most-travelled pilgrimage in the universe is made by beings who cannot obtain from it the one thing worth having, and who must be born human first to have any chance at it. They come anyway, three times a year, for eight days, to images of Jinas who are not there.

And that is the rite being copied on earth. The same eight days of aṣṭāhnika, kept now; fifty-two shrines ringing one, from Vimala Vasahi at Mount Abu onward; a slab carved with the whole island set up in a temple and worshipped. Nobody can go to Nandīśvara — so Nandīśvara is built here instead.