Mahavira Ji

Mahavira is the twenty-fourth and last tirthankara of the present age, and the figure whose historicity no scholarship disputes. His emblem is the lion. He was a contemporary of the Buddha, active in the same region of north-east India, and he appears in the Pali Buddhist canon under the name Nigantha Nataputta. He attained nirvana at Pawapuri, on the night Jains observe as Diwali.

Vardhamana was his birth name, meaning the one who grows. Mahavira, the great hero, is a title. Also Sanmati, rarely, and Nirgrantha or Niggantha, without knots, meaning free of household ties. In Buddhist texts he is Nigantha Nataputta, son of the Jnatrika clan. Readers meeting that name in a Buddhist source should know it is the same person.

Lanchana, the emblem: the lion. Body colour: yellow, with the shrivatsa on the chest, seated in lotus or standing in kayotsarga. Yaksha: Matanga. Yakshi: Siddhayika, shown in Shvetambara depiction riding a lion and four-armed, holding a book, the abhaya gesture of fearlessness, a citrus fruit, and a vina.

He renounced his household at about thirty, and practised severe, largely silent asceticism for roughly twelve and a half years, marked by extremes of fasting and endurance. He attained omniscience at forty-two or forty-three, beneath a sal tree on the bank of the Rijuvalika river near Jrimbhikagrama. He then taught for about thirty years, and attained nirvana at Pawapuri, where the Jal Mandir stands in its lotus tank. On the Buddha. The two were contemporaries, active during the reigns of the Magadhan kings Bimbisara and Ajatashatru. Mahavira is named in the Pali canon as one of six rival teachers of the Buddha's time, and a summary of his teaching of fourfold restraint appears in the Samannaphala Sutta of the Digha Nikaya. This is one of the few places where two living Indian traditions document each other in their own scriptures.

Father: King Siddhartha, of the Jnatrika clan. Birthplace: Kundagrama. On his mother, the Shvetambara account is distinctive and belongs only to them. It holds that he was first conceived by Devananda, a brahmin woman, and that the embryo was transferred by the god Harinegamesin into Queen Trishala, a kshatriya, so that he would be born into a suitably noble family. Digambara tradition does not include this episode, and it is applied to no other tirthankara. On marriage the sects differ sharply: Shvetambara tradition holds he married Yashoda and had a daughter, Priyadarshana; Digambara tradition holds he never married.

Pawapuri, his nirvana site, and Kundagrama, his birthplace, are the two places most closely his, and both are on this platform. His birthplace is itself disputed within Jainism. The mainstream and largely Shvetambara identification is Basukund near Vaishali; Digambara tradition identifies Kundalpur near Nalanda. This platform carries both and presents neither as settled. He is enshrined across India, including at Osian in Rajasthan, the foundational tirtha of the Oswal community, at Kumbhariya, at Shri Mahavirji, and at Kulpakji, where his image is carved from green jade.

The Digambara and Shvetambara differences are more substantial for Mahavira than for any other tirthankara, and several go to the heart of the two traditions:

• Marriage: married with a daughter (Shvetambara) against never married (Digambara). - Conception: the Devananda to Trishala embryo transfer is Shvetambara only. - Monastic dress: Digambara monks practise complete nudity, held to be indispensable to omniscience; Shvetambara monks wear white robes. - Women and liberation: Digambara doctrine holds that a woman cannot attain moksha in a female body; Shvetambara doctrine does not. - Canon: the two traditions preserve different scriptural collections. - The schism's own date: Shvetambara accounts place it in 82 CE, Digambara accounts in the third century BCE. These are recorded as what each tradition holds. This platform does not adjudicate between them.