Jain sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Jain site recorded in OpenStreetMap — not only temples, but the pilgrimage complexes, the precinct grounds, the schools, the shrines and the offices. 708 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by the area of its footprint and coloured by what kind of site it is.

This is the smallest map on HueMaps. It is about a third of the Sikh sites map, which is the next smallest.

Where the sites are

89% of them are in the Indian subcontinent, and that is roughly right rather than an artefact.

This is worth saying plainly because the neighbouring Sikh map has the opposite problem and says so at length: it reads as though Sikhism were a British and Canadian religion, because British gurdwaras are almost all mapped and Punjabi ones are mostly not. Jain sites do not show that distortion nearly as sharply. About 8% of this map is in North America, against a Jain diaspora there of well under a tenth of the world's Jains — so the diaspora is somewhat over-represented, but the map still reads as what Jainism is: an overwhelmingly Indian religion.

What is understated is the absolute number. India has many thousands of Jain temples; this map has around six hundred there. So the shape is close to honest and the count is a small fraction of the truth — which is the ordinary condition of OpenStreetMap in India, and the reason no figure on this page should be read as a census.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is. Nine of the ten kinds this family of maps recognises appear here:

Place of worship — the derasar or temple itself. 89% of this map.
Grounds — 5%, a temple precinct mapped as its own area rather than as the building.
Shrine or marker — 5%.
Religious building, former site, school, office, community building, burial site — one to three sites each.

There are no monasteries on this map, and that is a gap in the data rather than a fact about Jainism. Jain mendicant orders are central to the religion and their upashrayas are real, visitable buildings; OpenStreetMap simply has none of them recorded with the tag this map reads. Compare the Sikh map, where the empty rows are real — there is no Sikh monastic tradition to map at all. Here the absence means nobody has tagged them yet.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

53% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline — the highest share of any map in this family — and are given a nominal, typical size rather than the smallest one. Whether a site has been traced as an outline is a fact about the mapper, not about the site.

Because this is the sparsest map here, the symbols also have a higher floor than the larger maps, or most of it would be invisible at the zooms people actually use.

Places of worship are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, applied across this family of maps so that a religion's temples are not drawn smaller than the car parks and school fields beside them. It does less here than anywhere else, simply because 89% of this map is places of worship and there is little for them to be weighted against.

The largest sites

Shikharji, on Parasnath Hill in Jharkhand, is the largest at 0.72 km² — the most sacred of the Jain pilgrimage sites, where tradition holds that 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 established outside India, is the second largest thing on the map at 0.47 km².

Sites with no name

78% of the sites here carry a name, and the unnamed ones are shown just the same. A site nobody has named is still a site.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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