Height: Mangi 1,312 m | Tungi 1,343 m District: Nashik Region: Baglan tehsil, Sahyadri
About The Mountain
In the far north of Nashik district, where the Sahyadri begins to flatten toward the plains of Dhule, two peaks rise side by side from the same basalt ridge. They are so close together that from a distance they look like a single mass. But as you draw near, you see that they are two, distinct summits, each with its own height and its own character, separated by a narrow saddle of rock and sky. Mangi stands at 1,312 metres. Tungi rises a little higher at 1,343 metres. Together they are called Mangi-Tungi, and together they form one of the most sacred sites in the Jain world.
The twin peaks rise from the dry landscape of the Baglan tehsil with a sudden, dramatic authority. The country around them is largely open, scrub forest, farmland, the wide sky of the northern Deccan. Against this flat and open backdrop, Mangi-Tungi looks enormous. The rock faces are sheer in places, streaked pale and grey, and at the summit of Tungi a figure stands that can be seen from a very long distance: a massive statue of a Jain Tirthankara, white against the sky, arms at the sides, utterly still, looking out over everything.
The climb to the top is entirely on steps, more than four thousand of them, carved into the rock and built by devotees over many generations. The steps wind up through the basalt, past carved images and small shrines set into niches in the cliff face, past inscriptions in old scripts that pilgrims have left on the stone. It is a long climb. It takes most people several hours. But it is a climb that has been made, without interruption, for well over two thousand years.
At the summit of Tungi, the statue of Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara, the first of the twenty-four great teachers of the Jain tradition, stands 108 feet tall. It was consecrated in 2016, carved from a single rock on the mountain itself. It took years to complete. The figure stands in the kayotsarga posture, perfectly upright, arms at the sides, entirely still, in the meditative stance of one who has released all attachment to the body. From the plains far below, on a clear day, you can see the white figure standing against the sky.
The view from the top is one of the longest in the northern Sahyadri. The plains of Dhule stretch away to the north and west. Other peaks of the range rise and fall toward the south. On very clear days, it is said, you can see thirty, forty, fifty kilometres in every direction. But most of the people who reach the top are not looking at the view. They are standing before the shrines, completing a journey that, in some cases, has been the ambition of a lifetime.
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The Name
The names Mangi and Tungi are old, old enough that their precise origins have been discussed and debated in Jain scholarly tradition for centuries without final agreement. They are pre-Sanskrit names, most likely, belonging to the older linguistic layers of the region before the great Sanskrit texts gave their names to the sacred geography of India.
One tradition holds that the names come from the language of the tribal communities who lived in these hills long before the Jain pilgrimage tradition took root here. In that reading, Mangi and Tungi are simply the names those communities gave to the two peaks, names for things that were part of their landscape, their daily world, their sky. The peaks kept those names even as new layers of meaning were placed upon them.
Another tradition links the names to two women, two devotees, or in some tellings two sisters, whose stories have been absorbed so fully into the landscape that only their names remain. Mangi and Tungi as women who came to these peaks, who stayed, who prayed, whose presence became so associated with the stone and the height that the mountain itself took their names. This kind of naming, where a person and a place become one, is not unusual in the Sahyadri. We have seen it already at Anjaneri, where the mountain carries the name of Anjana because she lived there and prayed there and her son was born there.
What both traditions agree on is this: the names are not descriptive in the way that Brahmagiri or Saptashrungi are descriptive. They do not tell you what the mountain looks like or what sacred quality it carries. They are simply names, names that have been spoken in this landscape for so long that they have become the landscape. Mangi. Tungi. The two peaks, inseparable, holding each other’s company across the narrow saddle of rock between them.
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The Stories
Mangi-Tungi is primarily a place of Jain sacred tradition, and the stories that gather around it come from Jain texts and the oral memory of Jain communities across Maharashtra and Rajasthan and Gujarat. But the mountain also carries older stories, stories that belong to the landscape itself, and those are woven in here too.
The Place of the Last Liberation
The most sacred belief connected to Mangi-Tungi is this: it is said that on these twin peaks, at the end of this age of the world, one crore and one lakh Jain monks and sages, an almost unimaginably large number, attained moksha. Liberation. The final release from the cycle of birth and death and suffering.
In Jain tradition, moksha is not simply death. It is the complete liberation of the soul from karma, from all the accumulated weight of actions across countless lifetimes. A soul that attains moksha does not return. It rises, in Jain cosmology, to the very top of the universe, where liberated souls dwell in a state of pure knowledge, pure bliss, entirely free. To attain moksha is the highest possible achievement a soul can reach.
It is believed in this tradition that a group of great sages came to Mangi-Tungi and performed the practice of sallekhana, a voluntary, conscious, peaceful withdrawal from the body through fasting, in a state of complete equanimity and meditation. They left the body without disturbance, without grief, without clinging. And from these two peaks, it is said, their liberated souls rose upward together.
The scale of the number, one crore and one lakh, is not meant to be taken as a precise census. It is meant to convey the immensity of what happened here. That this mountain was a place of such spiritual power that liberation on a vast scale became possible here. That the energy of so many liberated souls is still present in the stone and the air. That when you climb these steps and stand at the top, you are standing in a place that has been, by the understanding of this tradition, touched by the highest thing that can happen to a soul.
The Tirthankaras Who Came Here
Jain tradition holds that Mangi-Tungi is connected to several of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, the great teachers who, across vast stretches of time, attained perfect knowledge and taught the path of liberation to others. A Tirthankara is not a god in the way that the gods of other traditions are gods. A Tirthankara is a human being who has, through immense effort across many lifetimes, cleared all karma from the soul and achieved omniscience. They teach. They show the way. And then they attain moksha.
It is said in the texts of the Digambara Jain tradition that Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara, the one whose statue now stands 108 feet tall at Tungi’s summit, is particularly associated with this mountain. His presence here, in the form of that great stone figure, is not accidental. It is a statement that this was his place, or a place connected to his tradition, to the lineage of liberation that he began at the very start of this age of the world.
Other Tirthankaras are also associated with Mangi-Tungi in the texts and local traditions. The mountain is mentioned in several Jain pilgrimage texts as a tirtha, a crossing place, a ford between the ordinary world and the sacred. A tirtha in Jain tradition is not simply a sacred site. It is a place where the crossing over is easier. Where the distance between the soul and liberation is, in some sense, shorter.
The Two Devotees
The folk tradition of the surrounding region carries a gentler story about the two peaks, one that does not require knowledge of Jain cosmology to hold. It is said that two women, deeply devoted to the divine, climbed these peaks separately and prayed for many years. They were not seeking fame or power or anything the world could give them. They were seeking only the kind of stillness that comes after a very long practice of letting things go.
In some tellings they are sisters. In others they are simply two souls who found the same mountain at the same time in their lives and understood, without speaking it, that this was the right place. They lived on the peaks, one on each summit, it is said, and the mountain held them as they completed their practice. When they left the body, the mountain kept their names.
It is the kind of story that does not need verification. It needs only the landscape and the imagination of people who have looked at two peaks standing close together and thought: two. Like companions. Like two people who chose the same hard, high, beautiful place to do the most important work of their lives.
The Ancient Caves and Their Carvings
Before the great statue at the summit, before the formal Jain pilgrimage tradition took its current shape, there were caves on these peaks. And in those caves, carved by hands that are now anonymous, are images that go back many centuries. The Digambara Jain inscriptions here include some of the oldest surviving Jain pilgrimage records in this part of Maharashtra. They are records of people who came and wanted to leave their names in the rock, to say: I was here. I made this climb. I stood on this mountain.
Scholars who have studied these inscriptions place some of them in the medieval period, and the pilgrimage tradition itself is believed to be far older than any inscription. There is a continuity here that few sacred sites can claim, a thread of devoted attention running from some unnamed early century, through the medieval dynasties of the Deccan, through the colonial period and its disruptions, through independence and into the present, unbroken. The steps have always had feet on them. The shrines have always had lamps in them.
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Why It Still Matters
Most of the mountains in this book are Hindu sacred sites, in the broad and varied sense that the word Hindu carries in Maharashtra. Mangi-Tungi is different. It is the great Jain pilgrimage site of the Sahyadri, and through it, this book touches a tradition that has been part of this landscape for as long as any tradition has.
Jainism is one of the oldest living religious traditions in the world. Its understanding of the soul, of karma, of liberation, of non-violence, these ideas have shaped the life of the Deccan for thousands of years, quietly, without the drama of conquest or conversion. The merchants who built temples in Nashik and Aurangabad, the philosophers who argued about the nature of knowledge in forest monasteries, the ordinary people who kept the fast of paryushana every year and taught their children that every living thing deserves care, they were part of this tradition. Mangi-Tungi is where that tradition placed its highest aspiration in the landscape of the Sahyadri.
The consecration of the 108-foot Rishabhanatha statue in 2016 brought Mangi-Tungi to wider attention. Jain pilgrims come from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, from across India and from abroad. They climb the four thousand steps as their ancestors climbed them, for the same reason: to stand in a place where liberation, by the understanding of their tradition, has already happened on a vast scale. To let that possibility feel closer.
There is something worth sitting with in the idea at the heart of Mangi-Tungi. That on these two peaks, at some point in the deep past, an enormous number of souls completed the work of many lifetimes and rose free. The mountain remembers this. The mountain is, in some sense, made of this. And the people who climb it are climbing into that memory, carrying their own weight of unfinished business, their own hope that the distance between where they are and where they want to be might, on this particular mountain, be a little shorter.
Two peaks. One name. A place where, it is believed, the hardest journey a soul can make was completed, not once, but beyond counting.