Source: The Associated Press
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/religion/story/505574.html
In a suburban landscape dotted with evangelical megachurches and auto malls, followers of an Indian religion thousands of years old spent days decorating marble idols and lighting incense to herald the opening of one of their faith’s largest temples.
The new $20 million Jain temple complex, celebrating a religion that promotes nonviolence and vegetarianism and shares with Hinduism the concepts of nirvana and reincarnation, is expected to attract pilgrims and scholars worldwide.
The soaring marble-and-limestone facade takes up almost an entire block in this working class city and dominates a mundane scene of laundromats, auto repair shops and taco stands with its domed roof and gleaming, coffee-colored pillars.
It replaces a much smaller temple that opened in 1988 about a decade after 25 Jain families first came together to worship in this northern Orange County city. That original building was the first independent Jain temple in the United States.
Twenty years later, intricate images of instrument-playing goddesses, idols, elephants and flowering lotuses line the marble walls and ceiling of the new temple. The designs were inspired by two famous Jain temples in India, both about 1,000 years old; tons of Indian marble were shipped in crates over six months to re-create the imagery, paid for almost entirely by member donations.
“You don’t see temples this size very often, even in India,” said Dilip V. Shah, president of Federation of Jain Associations in North America. “It’s so majestic. ... This is something to admire, and it inspires others.”