Rishabhaऋषभ

Rishabha (ऋषभ), or Ṛṣabhadeva, is the ascetic king of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa's fifth book — a ruler who governed flawlessly, then laid sovereignty aside to become the very type of the renunciant. The Bhāgavata counts him among the avatāras of Vishnu, born to King Nābhi and Queen Merudevī, and holds that his descent was to teach, by demonstration, the path of dispassion.

The story

As king, Rishabha exemplified duty; the Bhāgavata gives him a hundred sons, the eldest of whom, Bharata, tradition names as the sovereign after whom the land is called Bhārata-varṣa. Having instructed his sons in detachment, Rishabha abandoned the kingdom and wandered as an avadhūta — naked, silent, indifferent to abuse and honour alike, his conduct beyond every social measure. The account presses ascetic ideals to their limit: he behaved, the text says, like one deaf, dumb and blind to the world, though inwardly absorbed in bliss. His wandering carried him, the Bhāgavata relates, into the hill country of the peninsular south, where his body ended in a forest fire — a death as unpossessed as the life that preceded it.

Between two traditions

Rishabha's significance reaches beyond the Vaishnava canon. Jains revere Ṛṣabhanātha as the first of the twenty-four Tīrthaṅkaras of the present age, the primordial teacher who established civilization before renouncing it. Scholars have long noted the overlap between the two figures, and the Bhāgavata's portrait of a naked, wandering forefather of renunciation is widely read as Hindu tradition's acknowledgement of him. In either telling he stands for the same conviction: that the highest sovereignty is the one surrendered.