Mahavira's Great Renunciation

The 24th Tirthankara

The Jains say the world has known twenty-four tīrthaṅkaras — "makers of the crossing" — teachers who showed the way across the river of rebirth. The twenty-fourth was born Prince Vardhamāna, son of King Siddhārtha and Queen Triśalā of the Licchavi clan, in what is now Bihar, in the sixth or fifth century BCE. The Kalpa Sūtra, the Jaina biography, tells of his birth with the catalogue of auspicious dreams, and of a childhood surrounded by everything a prince could want.

He waited until his parents had died — not out of coldness, but out of care; the Jaina account says he would not grieve them with his departure. Then, at the age of thirty, he made the great renunciation.

The Twelve Years

It was done in the old way, and the texts count every detail. He left the palace in his palanquin, gave away his ornaments, and in a grove near the city, beneath an aśoka tree, he plucked out his hair in five handfuls — the gesture of leaving everything, done by his own hand. He put off his clothes and did not take them up again. For twelve and a half years he wandered, through villages and forests, silent for long stretches, accepting whatever food was offered, in all weathers, practicing ahimsā — non-violence — not as a rule but as a way of being alive: watching where he stepped, how he drank, what he accepted, so that no living thing would be hurt by his existence.

The tradition records the attacks he endured with equal calm — the dogs set on him, the false accusations, the villagers of one region who beat him — and the reply he made to all of it: forbearance. On the bank of the river Ṛjupālikā, under a sāla tree, in the thirteenth year, sitting in meditation, he attained kevala jñāna — complete knowledge, the state the Jains describe as seeing all things, everywhere, at once.

The Sangha

For thirty more years he taught, and the community that gathered around him — the four orders of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen — became the Jain saṅgha. His teaching distils to the five great vows: ahimsā (non-violence), satya (truth), asteya (not taking what is not given), brahmacarya (chastity), and aparigraha (non-possession) — with ahimsā holding all the others together, because every lie, every theft, every grasping is finally a violence.

He left the body at Pāvā, at seventy-two, having made the crossing he taught. His followers later divided into the Digambara and Śvetāmbara communities, who differ on details of practice and texts — but both keep the same center: a man who walked for twelve years harming nothing, and proved that the gentlest of all lives is also the most fearless.