Bahubali Ji

Bahubali, also called Gommateshwara, is the son of the first tirthankara Rishabhanatha, and one of the most visible figures in Indian sculpture: the colossal monoliths of Karnataka are his. He is not a tirthankara. He is a kevalin, one who attained omniscience, and the distinction is not pedantry. It is the reason the Mahamastakabhisheka is performed on his images and never on a tirthankara's.

Gommateshwara, Gommata, Gomateshwara. Not connected in any way to the fictional warrior-king of the 2015 to 2017 film franchise of a similar name, which causes real confusion.

Shown nude, per Digambara convention, standing in kayotsarga, with climbing vines wound around his legs and arms and anthills at his feet, sometimes with snakes emerging from them. Every element of that is narrative rather than decoration: it depicts the year he stood motionless in meditation, long enough for the forest to grow over him.

The conflict with Bharata is the heart of it. When Rishabhanatha renounced his kingdom he divided it among his hundred sons. Bharata, the eldest, received Ayodhya; Bahubali received a southern kingdom. After Bharata's conquests, his chakra-ratna, the discus of universal sovereignty, would not enter his own capital, because one man remained unsubdued: his brother. What followed, and how it ended, is the point of the story. Bahubali prevailed, and then renounced everything. Then the part that explains the ritual. He stood in meditation for a year, and the vines and anthills grew over him, but omniscience did not come, because a residue of pride in having defeated his brother still blocked it. It dissolved only when Bharata came and paid him homage in genuine remorse. Released from that last knot, he destroyed the remaining karmas and attained kevala jnana.

Father: Rishabhanatha, the first tirthankara. Mother: Sunanda. Brother: Bharata, from whom tradition holds the land takes its name. Birthplace: Ayodhya, of the Ikshvaku dynasty.

The Mahamastakabhisheka, and why it is his. The rite of anointing honours an ascetic struggle and a victory over ego. A tirthankara is already a fully realised Jina; there is no struggle left to commemorate. Bahubali's narrative is precisely the struggle, which is why the anointing belongs to his images and to no tirthankara's. The colossi, all in Karnataka and all on this platform: Shravanabelagola, 57 feet, erected 981 CE, the tallest and oldest; Karkala, 42 feet, 1432; Venur, 38 feet, 1604; and Dharmasthala, 39 feet, 1973. A fifth and smaller image of about 20 feet stands at Gommatagiri, of the twelfth century.

Digambara tradition places his kingdom at Podanapura, capital of Asmaka, and holds him to be the first person to attain final liberation in the present era. In its telling, two vidyadharis remove the creepers from his body. Shvetambara tradition places his kingdom at Taxila in Gandhara, and holds that Marudevi, Rishabhanatha's mother and Bahubali's grandmother, was the first to attain liberation in this era, not Bahubali. Those are not decorative differences: they disagree about who was first to be liberated in the present cosmic age.