Mahavira

Life

The traditional account places Mahavira's birth at Kundagrama, near Vaishali in present-day Bihar, into the Jnatrika clan of the kshatriya order. Jain chronology has long given his dates as 599 to 527 BCE; a substantial body of scholarship, working from the same evidence that has revised the Buddha's dates downward, places him nearer the fifth century. The two orders disagree on details of his early life, the Svetambara holding that he married and had a daughter, the Digambara that he never married.

At about thirty he renounced his household, and for twelve years practised an austerity the sources describe in extreme terms — long fasts, exposure, silence, and the deliberate acceptance of abuse. In the thirteenth year, on the bank of the Rjupalika river, he is said to have attained kevala jnana, complete knowledge. He taught for some thirty years thereafter and died at Pava, by the fast to death, at seventy-two.

Teaching

Mahavira is not presented as an innovator. Jain tradition holds that he restated the teaching of Parshvanatha, who preceded him, and the Buddhist canon independently confirms the existence of a Nigantha order before him. The change usually attributed to Mahavira is the addition of a fourth restraint — chastity — to Parshva's four, and a tightening of discipline including, in the Digambara account, the renunciation of clothing.

His teaching, as the tradition preserves it, sets out the soul's bondage by karmic matter, the graded vows by which influx is stopped, and the doctrine that reality can be described truly from many standpoints and completely from none. This last, anekantavada, is the position for which Jain philosophy became known, and it was developed by later thinkers well beyond anything the early texts attribute to him.

Sources

Almost everything known of Mahavira comes from within the tradition, chiefly the Acaranga and Kalpa Sutras, composed centuries after his death and shaped by hagiographic convention. Their value is uneven: the account of his ascetic practice is detailed and plausible, the accounts of his conception and birth are frankly miraculous.

The one substantial external witness is the Pali Buddhist canon, which refers to him repeatedly as Nigantha Nataputta, treats him as a rival teacher, and reports his death. That a hostile tradition attests his existence, his order and his approximate period is the strongest evidence available for the historical figure.

Legacy

The community Mahavira left has an unbroken existence of some two and a half thousand years, which makes Jainism among the oldest continuously practised religions. His death is commemorated at Diwali, which Jains observe as the anniversary of his liberation, and his birth at Mahavir Jayanti. In image he is shown seated or standing in meditation, identified by the lion that serves as his emblem.