Talk:Conversion of non-Hindu places of worship into temples

See also

AvinashCabral, the "see also" section is full of negative portrayal of conversion of non-Hindu places of worship to temples. Furthermore, the page "Saffronisation" do not talk anything about conversion of places of worship but has been suggested in the "see also" section. If this is the case, why are those links suggested in the see also section in the first place? Terrorism has nothing to do with this page. Looks more like anti-Hindu bias. It is just to claim his views to be "biased" and hypocrisy of the user towards Hinduism and ignorance of issues of other religions. If links like, Islamic terrorism, religious intolerance, religious persecution, religious violence in Pakistan, violence against Hindus, Islamization would to be added in the "see also" section of "Conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques" article, the user's views could be justified. Most of the abandoned churches by Christians in the west and non-Hindu temples has been taken over not by force or invasion but buy buying them over. Same instance could be seen at "Conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques". The see also has been changed in par with the prior mentioned page. Do not change as you please! This editor claims many of the converted temples has been taken over by "violent means". If it would to be proven, and the so called "violence" is as bad as how Hindus and Hindu temples of Goa has been forcefully destroyed and converted during the Portuguese inquisition by Christian invaders and many other temples by Islamic invaders all around India, the user's views can be accepted. It would be better if there's strong evidence and sources for the claims rather than a mere claim. Hence, if the claims are proven, the "see also" section of this article could be added with the user's views. When in none of the pages with similar list of other religions speaks about their version of terrorism or Islamisation or Christianization, why only Hinduism is portrayed in a bad light? This is nothing but hypocrisy! Naveen Ramanathan (talk) 06:18, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree to some extent. This whole thing, which can be a detailing guide through history particularly if RE CONVERTED temples and newly converted ones are distinctly classified. Due to the hundreds of years of Colonization there are a lot of the earlier but scantly those of the latter, and even rarer are those which involve armed violence and killings similar to how many of the conversion into mosques occurred. This whole thing smells less like an attempt at bridging gaps than at stoking anger and violence. The page as it is, should be deleted frankly. MRpcubed1145 (talk) 07:55, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Article is misleading without referencing that the Babri mosque site was a pre-modern mosque, without mentioning that there was a temple that existed on it as found in the detailed Archaeological survey report of 2003. Wikipedia is for giving complete information to the users and not presenting half-baked facts. Any curious reader would also come across other Wikipedia articles on [Ayodhya dispute], would find this article to be ingenious. While Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced platform, it inherently relies on the trust readers place on the information. This article is an ingenious attempt that brings down the trust readers place in Wikipedia. Would be requesting either the article should be edited to show the full picture or it should be deleted as requested by other users, who admittedly have emotional responses. Nevertheless, we should strive to make Wikipedia a unbiased platform and leave it to readers to interpret. An ingenious attempt at omitting vital information destroys the credibility of the platform and makes it a political or religious springboard for nefarious characters. We should strive for higher standards, no matter what our personal biases are. Yusan90

Whether there existed any premodern temple at the site is disputed. Thanks, TrangaBellam (talk) 09:24, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I gave reference for the claims. One can't dispute the archaeological findings without any credible source. He said, she said, they said, is again not a credible source. If you think presence of a pre-modern temple is disputed, then it should be mentioned on the page. My objection is on presenting half-facts, something that has not been addressed. Again, if the intention is to make this a political or religious springboard, it's your choice but please let's be more specific here to maintain the quality and trustworthiness of this forum. Thank you. Yusan90 (talk) 03:44, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

If you believe that there are sufficient sources to support that there was a premodern temple at the site, please enact those changes at the parent pages. Thanks. TrangaBellam (talk) 08:04, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Article is misleading without referencing that the Babri mosque site was a pre-modern mosque. It should be removed

~~ Devesh S N Bhatta (talk) 03:06, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

References

Jains

None of the links are working. We need detailed citations with page-numbers. TrangaBellam (talk) 18:46, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

@Kautilya3 and Vanamonde93: - Watchlist this page, if it is not there already. TrangaBellam (talk) 18:52, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 8 January 2022

There has been a claim that the Babri Masjid is an "identified original building that has been converted into a Hindu Temple". This is a fallacy, as well as Hindumisic. This is because, the Archaeological Survey of India conducted an excavation of the disputed site on the orders of Supreme court. Various materials have been found during excavation which suggest the presence of a Hindu structure beneath. Also, The Supreme Court of India noted that the Babri Masjid was not built on a vacant land and the excavated underneath structure was not Islamic in nature.

I'd request you remove this potential violence invoking fallacy as soon as possible. I hope we all respect everyone's religious beliefs, whilst also maintaining true and factual information on Wikipedia. HueHueHue67 (talk) 15:22, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

 Not done I'm not getting into an archaeological dispute; but reliable sources unanimously agree that a Mosque stood at this site for a few hundred years before beind torn down, and that a state-sanctioned temple is being built there today. What came before the mosque isn't relevant to this article. Vanamonde (Talk) 00:18, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Dear , "reliable sources" also agreed that originally it was the birth place of Hindu Revered person. and the dispute was settled just recently and mutually . Being a responsible person, I hope you will not fuel it again. If you are not interested to get into the archeological dispute, then please remove the name of the place, because the dispute was settled mutually based only on archeological facts. Please allow all Indians to live in harmony. Rajajirishi (talk) 07:04, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Is this how you do scholarly work? 2601:7C0:CB00:42D0:84C2:AD6D:8BE5:BA88 (talk) 18:09, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

References

Scholarship on the topic

TrangaBellam (talk) 20:40, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Lede claim needs citation

Lede claim needs citation. If one isn't available, then this claim should be removed. Webberbrad007 (talk) 21:51, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Misused reference

the first reference itself is contradicting what is written in this article and the example of Durga temple in Aihole, India is contradictory to its own Wikipedia article. Trsuyash (talk) 07:56, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Inclusion of other religious sites converted to Hindu temples.

Extensive and sourced reports of non Hindu places of worship that have been turned into temples have been included to the list. AliBabar1642 (talk) 05:26, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Removal of edits made by a suspended account

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AliBabar1642, a user originally suspended for excessive bias in their edits, and subsequently again for trying to bypass it by using multiple accounts, has made substantial edits to this page.

Link to their original account: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AvinashCabral

I think if a user did in fact get banned for biased edits, then their edits should not be allowed to stay on this article. The bias is evident here too.

I request these edits to be removed, and the article reverted to its original state. Smart Sherlock (talk) 12:47, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Removing listed temples

Jagannath Temple

It should be pointed out that there is no evidence to support the belief that the great temple at Puri occupies a former Buddhist site. Nor do any of the manifestations of the cult of Jagannatha, such as the great car festival, the icon with the supposed relic of Krsna, the absence of caste rules in the temple, or the identification of the god with the Buddha Avatara of Visnu, suffice to establish a Buddhist origin of the worship of Jagannatha. Nor can Puri be identified with Dantapura. So far no Buddhist remains have been discovered inside the Puri temple or in the neighbourhood of the town, with the exception of a life-size stone image of a seated Buddha evidently brought to the temple from elsewhere.

— O.M. Starza

Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 07:13, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

@Witchilich:, the Buddhist procession that Fa Hian wrote about didn't take place in Puri (or anywhere in India, it was Khotan iirc), so it can't be taken as a definitive evidence of the Rath Yatra being Buddhist. Unity in Diversity: The Uniqueness of Jagannath Culture of Odisha from Odisha Review talks about how the Jagannath culture has assimilated elements from other beliefs, not that it was originally Buddhist.

Even if Jagannath were a Buddha, and rituals associated with him Buddhist in origin, that still wouldn't prove that Jagannath Temple was a Buddhist temple that was converted to a Hindu temple.

Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 08:35, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

In that case we can put Starza's retorts to the debate instead of completely removing the section based on his opinion. Witchilich (talk) 14:36, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

@Witchilich I don't think this page is the correct place to argue if it was a Buddhist temple, there is discussion regarding that in the Wikipedia page of Jagannath Temple itself.

Just how Babri Masjid is not included in Conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques because there is no consensus, Jagannath Temple should be omitted from this page; as there's simply not enough evidence. Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 17:44, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

This is not like the Babri Masjid issue. There is overall way more academic consensus(from odia, non-odia and foreign historians alike), that Jagannath temple was formerly Buddhist. You can't use the argument of one or two critics to draw a definitive conclusion that there is no Buddhist origin of the temple. Witchilich (talk) 18:09, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

@Witchilich as I said before, even if Jagannath was believed to be Buddha, and his rituals had Buddhist origins, that still doesn't prove that the Jagannath Temple was Buddhist.

The earliest mention of Jagannath that was made by Indrabhuti, the king of Sambalpur, might not even be about the deity of Puri:

Puri (Purushottama Puri) is the seat of Purushottama and not of Jagannath. In the 10th century A.D. a religious revolution synthesised Jagannath of Sambalpur with Purushottama of Puri. It may be said that an important cave in the Court Samalai hill near Sonepur is attributed by the local people as the earliest seat of the worship of Lord Jagannath. It appears that Jagannath of Raja Indrabhuti was installed in that cave giving rise to the tradition, which is current even in the present day.

The Wikipedia article of Puri says, "In the Rigveda, in particular, it is mentioned as a place called Purushamandama-grama meaning the place where the Creator deity of the world – Supreme Divinity deified on an altar or mandapa was venerated near the coast and prayers offered with Vedic hymns. Over time the name got changed to Purushottama Puri and further shortened to Puri, and the Purusha came to be known as Jagannatha. . . . When the present temple was built by the Eastern Ganga king Anantavarman Chodaganga in the 11th and 12th centuries AD, it was called Purushottamkshetra."

Inscriptions from around the time of construction of the temple by Anantavarman, talk about the worship of Purushottama, so how can we say that the original temple at the site was Buddhist?

That there was an earlier temple of Jagannath at Purushottama Kshetra prior to the present one built by Chodaganga Deva in 12th century A.D is proved by Devayatana of God Purushottama in Krishna Mishra's Prabodha Chandrodaya Natakam (c.1078 A.D). . . . The name Jagannath is used for the first time in the inscriptions of king Bhanudeva-II (1306-1328 A.D). ("Puri Copper Plates of Bhanudeva-II", Ed. D.C.Sircar, JASB, XVIII, I, 1956, P.25).

Even D. N. Jha has said that that the claim about the Jagannath Temple being built on a Buddhist site can be contested:

Even the Jagannath temple at Puri, one of the most prominent Brahminical pilgrimage centres in eastern India, built in the twelfth century during the reign of the Eastern Ganga ruler Anantavarman Chodaganga Deva, is said to have been constructed on a Buddhist site. . . . While the Buddhist antecedent of the Jagannath temple may be contested, there is hardly any doubt that the temples of Purneshvara, Kedareshvara, Kanteshvara, Someshvara and Angeshvara, all in Puri district, were either built on Buddhist viharas, or made of material derived from them.

Do you have a source that proves that the original Jagannath Temple in Puri was Buddhist? Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 08:58, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

The current temple was built by Chodaganga Deva in 12th century. The Purushottam Ksehtra of old texts can't be conclusively determined to be the same location as modern Jagannath temple site. Meanwhile the rituals of the Jagannath temple are based on Mahayana Buddhism. Oldest mention of the deity Jagannath is by Indrabhuti, the ancient Buddhist king of Oddiyana, in Jñānasiddhi. Witchilich (talk) 19:39, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

@Witchilich, the article says that the older temple wasn't at the same location as the new one, but it also says that by the time the new temple was constructed Purushottama Kshetra was a well-known centre of worship of Vishnu. As I have said before, rituals and traditions of Jagannath having origins in Buddhism does not automatically mean that the present temple was built over a Buddhist site.

The book says that Puri was a Buddhist centre, where a procession of Buddha's relics took place. While the first part might be true, I wonder if the author is talking about Buddha's tooth relic of Dantapura, and associating Dantapura or Dantapuri with modern-day Puri. The actual location of Dantapuram is disputed.

So these arguments still don't prove that the current Jagannath temple is built over a Buddhist site.

People speculate that the Brahma Padartha of the Jagannath idol is actually a tooth relic, but that can't be proved unless someone examines it (which is impossible, since even the priests aren't allowed to do that). Even if it was the tooth relic, who's to say that it wasn't brought from another site, and was a part of the "original" temple? Therefore, unless remains of a Buddhist site are found underneath the Jagannath temple, or a contemporary source is found that mentions the conversion to a Hindu temple, all of this would remain a speculation.

Btw, Oddiyana was more likely in Swat and not Odisha, and even if it was in Odisha, Indrabhuti was the king of Sambalpur and not Puri; and as I mentioned before, the Jagannath he worshipped might have originally been distinct from Purushottam. Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 19:00, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Deleting this:

Current Name	Buddhist Structure	Images	City	Country	Notes
Jagannath temple	unknown	Three Buddhist symbols in the upper panel, east face, of the left pillar of the southern gateway at Sanchi. Alexander Cunningham examined a sketch of these three symbols and believed the modern Jagannath and his siblings are based on this Triratna symbol. Harekrushna Mahatab also believes the wooden Jagannath triad idols are the Buddhist Triratna of Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha, and the minor fourth image of Sudarshana Chakra is the Dharmachakra. But Starza argues that these Buddhist symbols bear little resemblance to the modern Jagannath triad.	Puri, OR	India	Faxian (c. 400 CE), the ancient Chinese pilgrim and visitor to India wrote about a Buddhist procession in his memoir, and this has very close resemblances with the Jagannath festivities. There is no distinction of caste inside the Jagganath temple, many day-to-day services (Vidhis) of Lord Jagannatha owe their origin either to Jainism or to Buddhism or the combination of both, the local legends link the idols with aborginal tribes and the daitapatis (servitors) claim to be descendants of the aboriginals. Majority of rituals are based on Oddiyana Tantras which are the refined versions of Mahayana Tantras as well as Shabari Tantras which are evolved from Tantric Buddhism and tribal believes respectively. Buddhism anciently prevailed in Odisha as appears from the Buddhist remains still existing. The idols of Jagannatha is believed to contain the bones of Krishna even though it forms no part of the Brahmanical religion to collect and adore dead men's bones while it is a most meritorious act among the Buddhists to collect and preserve the relics of departed saints, and the places that contain them are esteemed peculiarly holy. Further the season in which the Ratha-Yatra festival is observed is about the same time when the historic public processions welcomed Buddhist monks for their temporary, annual monsoon-season retirement. In the Jagannath cult, Jagannath is represented as the ninth avatar of Vishnu just like Buddha in the Vishnu Purana. According to Starza, these manifestation of the Jagannath cult, such as the supposed tooth relic of Buddha, the Ratha-Yatra, the absence of caste rules in the temple and the identification of Jagannath with Buddha avatar are not sufficient to establish a Buddhist origin of the worship of Jagannath. Jñānasiddhi by Indrabhuti opens with an invocation of Jagannath. Sarala Das in his Mahabharata identified Jaganath with Buddha multiple times.

Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 08:52, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Ghantai Temple

According to the source cited, Ghantai temple was a Buddhist temple which was converted to a Jain temple. Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 11:42, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Sahasra Lingeshwarelayam

Deleting this as the source cited doesn't mention a Jain shrine at this location being converted to a Shiva temple:

Current Name	Jain Structure	Images	City	Country	Notes
Sahasra Lingeshwarelayam	Tribhuvanatilaka Jinalaya	[image]	Vemulawada, TS	India	A Jain shrine called Tribhuvanatilaka Jinalaya on the Bommalagutta hillock near Kurikyala village, was built during the Chalukya dynasty. It is now a Shiva temple.

Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 06:23, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Gokarneshwar Temple (Odisha)

Correcting this, as the first source cited doesn't refer to the same Gokaraneshwar Temple― it's about the one in Mathura; and the second source doesn't even mention the name of this temple:

Current Name	Jain Structure	Images	City	Country	Notes
Gokarneshwar Temple	unknown	[image]	Jamubania, OR	India	Anti-caste scholars argue that this temple, in the village of Jamubania, was built on a site of a Buddhist structure.

The Gokarneshwar Temple in Jamubania in Jaraka is near Deuli Hill, which has Buddhist remains; but I couldn't find a source that says that the temple itself was built on a Buddhist site. —Yuyutsu Ho (talk) 20:03, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Starza, O. M. (1993). The Jagannatha Temple at Puri: Its Architecture, Art and Cult. Studies in South Asian culture, 15. Leiden; New York; Köln: Brill. ISBN 90-04-09673-6.