Manjunatha

Manjunatha is the form of Shiva enshrined at Dharmasthala, a temple town on the Netravati river in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka. The shrine is among the most visited in southern India, drawing pilgrims from across Karnataka and well beyond, and it is distinguished less by its architecture than by an arrangement found nowhere else: a Shiva temple administered by a hereditary Jain family, with worship conducted by Vaishnava brahmins of the Madhva order. The name Dharmasthala, the place of dharma, is taken by devotees as a description rather than a boast.

The tradition

Local tradition traces the temple to the household of the Pergades, a Jain chieftain family of the region, who are said to have been visited by guardian spirits, the dharma daivas, and charged with the practice of charity and the protection of the site. The linga of Manjunatha is held to have been brought later from Kadri, near Mangalore, where an older Manjunatha temple still stands. The daivas remain part of the cult: alongside the worship of Shiva, Dharmasthala keeps the spirit traditions of Tulu Nadu, and the shrines of the guardian deities receive their own rites. The Heggade, head of the Pergade line, continues as the temple's administrator and is regarded by devotees as the deity's steward on earth.

Worship

Two practices define the pilgrimage. The first is annadana, the feeding of every visitor without charge, maintained on a scale that runs to tens of thousands of meals a day during busy seasons. The second is the settling of disputes: Dharmasthala has long served as a seat of arbitration, and parties come to swear oaths and lay quarrels before Manjunatha and the Heggade. An oath taken at Dharmasthala carries weight in the surrounding districts that few courts can match.

The town

The temple's annual lamp festival, the Laksha Deepotsava, fills the town with lights and with a fair that includes literary and religious assemblies. On a hill nearby stands a monolithic statue of the Jain renunciant Bahubali, a reminder that at Dharmasthala the boundaries between traditions are deliberately kept soft. Pilgrims commonly pair the visit with Kukke Subrahmanya and the other temple towns of the Ghats, but Dharmasthala remains the anchor of the circuit.