Parshvanatha

The traditional account

Jain tradition places Parshvanatha at Varanasi, the son of King Ashvasena and Queen Vama, and holds that he renounced his position at thirty, attained omniscience after eighty-four days of ascetic practice, taught for some seventy years, and died on the hill in Jharkhand that now bears his name. He is given a lifespan of a hundred years, and placed 250 years before Mahavira — which, taken with the traditional dates for Mahavira, would put him in the ninth or eighth century BCE.

He is recognised in image by the serpent hood arching above him. The associated narrative describes a serpent king, Dharanendra, sheltering Parshva from a storm raised by an adversary while he stood in meditation. The motif is old and stable, and makes him one of the most easily identified figures in Jain art.

The historical case

Parshvanatha's importance to historians lies in the four restraints attributed to his order — not to kill, not to lie, not to steal, not to possess — to which Mahavira is said to have added chastity as a fifth. This is not the kind of detail a later tradition invents, since it complicates the founder's originality rather than enhancing it.

The Buddhist canon supplies indirect support. It describes an established Nigantha order with its own doctrine and discipline already in existence during the Buddha's lifetime, which is difficult to explain if Mahavira had founded it within living memory. The Jain texts themselves preserve an account of followers of Parshva's order negotiating their merger with Mahavira's, retaining traces of a real institutional history.

None of this establishes his dates. Most scholars accept that a teacher of this name preceded Mahavira and that his order was absorbed; the traditional 250-year interval and the ninth-century placement are treated with more caution.

Sites

Parasnath Hill, or Sammed Shikhar, in the Giridih district of Jharkhand, is held to be where Parshvanatha and twenty of the twenty-four tirthankaras attained liberation. It is the most important Jain pilgrimage site in eastern India, climbed by pilgrims on a circuit of many kilometres. Temples to Parshvanatha are among the most numerous in the Jain world, and he is a common focus of lay devotion.