Tirthankara

The idea

The word means maker of a tirtha, a ford or crossing-place. The image is of a river that must be crossed, and of a teacher who does not carry anyone across but shows where the crossing can be made. This is consistent with the wider Jain position that no being can liberate another: a tirthankara teaches, and the hearer does the work.

A tirthankara is not a god, and Jains are explicit that the tirthankaras neither create the world nor intervene in it. Having attained liberation they are wholly detached and cannot respond to petition. Worship is directed at them as an example and a focus for the worshipper's own discipline, a distinction that Jain writers have defended at length against the charge that their practice is indistinguishable from theism.

The twenty-four

Each half-cycle of time produces twenty-four. The present series runs from Rishabhanatha, held to have taught agriculture, writing and social organisation at the beginning of the current age, to Mahavira, who died in the fifth or sixth century BCE. The interval between them, in traditional chronology, is measured in units so vast as to be outside historical reckoning, and the lifespans and statures of the earlier figures diminish steadily towards the historical period.

Historians treat Mahavira as historical, and Parshvanatha as probably so. The other twenty-two are figures of tradition. Two carry particular weight beyond that: Rishabhanatha as a culture-hero, and Neminatha, whom tradition makes a cousin of Krishna, linking the Jain series to the wider Indian epic material.

Recognising them in image

Tirthankara images are deliberately uniform. All are shown either seated in meditation or standing in the kayotsarga posture, without expression, ornament or attribute, since all have attained the same state. Digambara images are unclothed; Svetambara images may be given eyes, clothing and ornament.

They are told apart by the lanchana, a small emblem carved on the base or pedestal — a bull for Rishabhanatha, a lion for Mahavira, a serpent hood for Parshvanatha, a conch for Neminatha. Without the emblem, and without an inscription, an image cannot reliably be assigned. Museum labelling of Jain sculpture frequently depends on this single detail.