Kunthunatha Ji

Kunthunatha is the seventeenth tirthankara of the present age. His emblem is the goat. Like his predecessor Shantinatha and his successor Aranatha, he was also a Chakravartin and a Kamadeva, and like them he was born at Hastinapur.

Kunthu, and Kunthanatha. Tradition derives the name from a dream his mother had of a heap of jewels called Kunthu.

Lanchana, the emblem: the goat. Body colour: golden, seated or standing in meditation. Yaksha and yakshi: not found. No source consulted names an attendant pair for Kunthunatha at all. This is recorded as a genuine gap rather than filled in by analogy with his neighbours in the sequence, which would be guessing. Seated bronze images of him from the eleventh-century Aluara hoard, found near Dhanbad and now in the Patna Museum, are significant for the iconography of the later tirthankaras in eastern India.

The story of his renunciation turns on a small, deflating discovery. Having conquered all lands as Chakravartin, he went, as custom required, to inscribe his name on the foothills of the mountain where such names are recorded. He found the names of earlier chakravartins already there. Understanding in that moment how little his conquest amounted to, he renounced the throne and became an ascetic. He attained liberation at Shikharji.

Father: King Surya. Mother: Queen Shridevi. Birthplace: Hastinapur, of the Kuru-Ikshvaku line.

Principal places on this platform: Hastinapur, his birthplace, where he flanks Shantinatha in the Bada Mandir; a dedicated tonk at Shikharji, his liberation site; and the fifteenth-century Shvetambara temple inside Jaisalmer Fort. Elsewhere he is enshrined at the ninth-century Karanthai Jain temple in Tamil Nadu, and at the Ganigitti Jain temple at Hampi, whose inscription of 1385 dedicates it to him.

No sectarian divergence could be established, because no source consulted names his attendants at all. That is a gap in the research rather than a finding that no difference exists. As with Shantinatha, the substantive confusion risk is with the two tirthankaras either side of him, whose biographies are nearly identical in outline.