How Old Is Satrunjay Tirth? Shatrunjaya's Real Age

Short answer: the tirth and the temples are two different ages, and the question usually confuses them. As a place of worship, Jain tradition places Shatrunjaya (Palitana, Gujarat) in the time of Rishabhdev / Adinath, the first Tirthankara — beyond historical counting altogether. As stone, almost nothing on the hill today is older than the sixteenth century. Both statements are true. Here is each one with its evidence.

1. In tradition: measured in aras, not centuries

Tradition does not give Shatrunjaya a founding date, and that is deliberate — it treats the hill as older than the reckoning. What it gives instead is a rate of decline:

In the time of Shri Rishabhdev, the tirtha-bhumi of Shatrunjaya extended fifty yojan; by the end of the fourth ara, only twelve yojan of it remained.

This is the real traditional answer to "how old". The tirtha is not dated in years — it is dated in aras, the descending eras of the Jain time-cycle, and it is understood to be shrinking, not ageing. On that reckoning Shatrunjaya belongs to the same order of antiquity as Adinath himself.

Its sanctity is tied to a specific event rather than a construction:

Here, long ago, the sages beginning with Pundarik, their whole succession of karmas exhausted, went to liberation in crores. Therefore, among all tirthas, this lord of mountains is the great tirtha.

Pundarik Swami was Adinath's chief ganadhara, and his liberation on this hill is why Shatrunjaya's oldest names are Pundarikgiri, along with Siddhachal, Vimalachal and Siddhakshetra — every one of them a name about liberation, not about a temple.

2. In stone: mostly sixteenth and seventeenth century

The hill's buildings are much younger than the tirth, and Jain sources say so plainly rather than hiding it.

• The temple city was sacked in 1313 CE.
• Restorations followed, and the largest of them — Karmashah's, in the sixteenth century — was itself destructive: the corpus records that during it, the structures raised on Shatrunjaya by the ministers Vastupal and Tejpal (thirteenth century) were completely lost, along with other ancient shrines. What replaced them is what visitors see now.
• Karmashah obtained the necessary permission by farman from Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. Jain sources tell the story behind it: when Bahadur Shah was a fugitive sheltering with Rana Sanga at Chittor, Karmashah gave him a lakh of rupees on the understanding that, once on the throne, he would allow the consecration at Shatrunjaya. He kept the promise.
• Later, Akbar's farman to Acharya Hiravijaysuri granted Siddhachal (Shatrunjaya) together with Girnar, Taranga, Kesariyanathji, Abu and Sametshikharji to the Svetambara Sangh.
• The surviving inscriptions on the hill are correspondingly late — the building record of the brothers Padmasinh and Vijaypal, for instance, is dated Samvat 1675 (Shake 1541), in the month of Vaishakh, with further work completed in Samvat 1676.

3. The uddhars — how tradition itself counts the age

Rather than one date, tradition counts a series of uddhars — major restorations, each one a re-founding. The numbering is not vague: the Jain e-library holds a whole volume on Javad Shah's, and its title fixes the ordinal — Vajraswami ane Javad Shah, athva Shatrunjay-no 13-mo Uddhar, "the thirteenth uddhar of Shatrunjaya".

So the honest way to state the age is: a continuously re-founded tirth, whose sanctity tradition traces to Adinath and Pundarik, whose recorded restorations run into the medieval period, and whose present temples date mostly from the sixteenth century onward.

So what should you say?

• "Shatrunjaya is over two thousand years old" — too small a number, and not what tradition claims. Tradition claims far more than two millennia.
• "The Shatrunjaya temples are ancient" — not accurate; most are 16th–17th century, and the genuinely old work was destroyed in 1313 and again during the sixteenth-century restoration.
• "Shatrunjaya has been a tirth since the time of Adinath, and the temples standing on it today are largely sixteenth-century rebuildings" — this is the accurate sentence.

Related: Where did the Tirthankaras attain moksha?

Further reading — from the Jain e-library

• Shatrunjay Mahatmya — Dhaneshwarmuni, ed. Shravak Hiralal Hansraj (1908, Sanskrit)
• Shatrunjaya Mahatmya — Shravak Bhimsinh Manek (1899, Gujarati)
• Shatrunjay Mahatirthoddhar Prabandh — Jinvijay (1917)
• Vajraswami ane Javad Shah athva Shatrunjay 13-mo Uddhar — Manilal Nyalchand (1933)
• Some Inscriptions and Images on Mount Satrunjaya — Ambalal P. Shah (1989)
• Temple of Satrunjaya — Jain Bhawan Publication (1977)