Who pays.
Trusts, and public competitive giving. The Anandji Kalyanji Pedhi has run Shatrunjaya and other major Svetambara sites since the eighteenth century. The right to perform particular temple rites is auctioned openly, and donors are named on the walls. Jains are about 0.4 percent of India's population, among its wealthiest communities per head, and among its largest philanthropic givers.
Jain institutional funding runs through trusts, of which the Anandji Kalyanji Pedhi, administering Shatrunjaya and a large number of other Svetambara Murtipujak sites, is the most significant and has operated since the eighteenth century. Temple building and renovation is funded by public subscription, and the mechanism is competitive: the right to perform a specific rite, to install an image, to carry a particular object in a procession, or to sponsor a dream image during the Kalpa Sutra reading is auctioned openly, with sums announced and donor names inscribed. This looks jarring against a religion of non-possession, and Jains debate it; the classical defence is that giving wealth away is precisely aparigraha in practice, and that public naming encourages more of it. Jains are roughly 0.4 percent of India's population, have the highest literacy rate of any Indian religious community in census data, are among the wealthiest per head, and give at a rate far above their share — a combination that has made the community's philanthropy nationally significant and its internal arguments about wealth persistent.
The same ground, other faiths
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