Jain sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

This map holds Jain derasars and temples, pilgrimage complexes, precincts mapped as their own grounds, shrines, schools and offices. There are more than 700 sites worldwide. Colour represents which kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every site here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any temple register.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `jain`. We take the tag at its word, and we don't infer the religion from a building's shape or its name.

Nine of the ten kinds of site we recognise appear. Nearly nine in ten are places of worship, and most of the remainder splits between grounds, meaning a temple precinct mapped as an area rather than as the building, and shrines or markers. Religious buildings, schools, offices and burial sites appear in ones and twos.

Colour

Colour represents the kind of site rather than the religion, because the religion is the whole map. With so much of the map in one class, the colours mostly separate a temple from the precinct around it. You can switch a class off in the legend.

The legend has no monastery row. Jain mendicant orders are central to the religion and their upashrayas are real buildings that people visit, but nobody has recorded one with the tag we read, so that absence sits in the data rather than in the world.

The largest sites

Shikharji, on Parasnath Hill in Jharkhand, is the largest at about 0.7 km². Tradition holds it as the place where twenty of the twenty-four tirthankaras attained liberation. The Palitana temple complex in Gujarat is here too, and Siddhachalam in New Jersey, the first Jain pilgrimage site founded outside India, is the second largest. A pilgrimage hill covers far more ground than a temple on a street, so the biggest dots are places rather than buildings.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. More than half of these sites are mapped as a point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for much of this map the size of a dot is not telling you how large the site is.

We draw places of worship as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about 1.4 times as wide, so that a temple is not drawn smaller than the car park beside it. Because there are so few sites in all, the dots also have a higher floor than we use elsewhere, or much of the map would be invisible at the zooms people actually use.

Where the map is empty

A gap means nobody has mapped a Jain site there. Most of what is here is in India, which is roughly the right shape, but the count is a small fraction of the truth. India holds many thousands of Jain temples and OpenStreetMap has several hundred of them. The mapping is thin rather than the religion being small, and no figure on this page should be read as a count of Jain places.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A temple shown here may have been rebuilt or renamed since a mapper last visited it.

Source and licence

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