Makrana White Marble Adinath Rishabhdev Murti, 18in

Who this murti is

This is Bhagwan Adinath (Rishabhdev, Adishwar), the first of the twenty-four Tirthankaras and the one Jain tradition credits with teaching agriculture, craft and letters before he renounced them. Two carved details name him. The first is the bull, his lanchhana, cut on the face of the pedestal: every Tirthankara shares the same serene seated form, and it is the emblem below that tells a devotee which of the twenty-four stands before him. The second is the hair. Adinath is the only Jina conventionally shown with long jata locks falling loose over both shoulders, the strands tradition says Indra asked him to leave when he performed kesh-lochan, and any murti of him without them is simply not him.

Why Makrana marble for a Jina

Makrana is the stone Jain builders chose when they were building to last, and the Chaumukha temple at Ranakpur, dedicated to Adinath himself, is the argument for it. The quarries sit in Rajasthan's Nagaur district, a few hours by road from Jaipur. What matters for a murti at this scale is that the stone is dense and almost closed-pored: it takes a deep undercut without the edge crumbling, which is exactly what the twelve separate hair strands, the beaded kandora and the small recumbent bull demand. It also stays white. Daily abhishek, kesar and dhoop over decades dull a soft marble and yellow it; Makrana holds its satin surface and its colour.

The carving

We draw the murti with you, brief it, and stay with it through to installation; the cutting is done by the master sculptors we work with in Jaipur, who carve Tirthankar murtis to Shvetambar convention as ordinary work rather than as a special order. A squared block is roughed to the seated silhouette, the lotus cushion and stepped pedestal are blocked in, and detail begins only once the proportion is right. The face, the flat-stacked palms, the jata, the srivatsa and the bull are cut by hand throughout, with no machine on them, and the piece is then taken up through progressively finer abrasives to a soft satin polish that holds light instead of throwing it back in a glare.

An 18-inch murti in a home derasar

Eighteen inches is the upper end of domestic scale: large enough to be the mulnayak of a home derasar and to be read properly from six or eight feet away, small enough that one person can lift and bathe it. Allow about two feet of clear shelf width and fourteen inches of depth so the pedestal is not crowded and there is room for a thali in front. Seat it high enough that a seated devotee looks slightly up at the face rather than down at it. A plain pale wall or an undecorated wooden ghar-mandir behind suits the carving; a patterned backdrop competes with the jata and flattens the srivatsa.

Commissioning yours

Everything here can move. The same Adinath can be cut larger for a community derasar, in black stone or Vietnam white instead of Makrana, given open chakshus with applied silver eyes, set on a taller singhasan, or surrounded by a full parikar with toran arch, chamar-bearers and the Gomukha and Chakreshwari attendants. Tell us the height of your shrine and the date you would like to do the pratishtha, and we will work back from it. A murti at this size takes eight to twelve weeks from the day the drawing is approved, before crating and transit.