The ultimate — what this line takes as final
T
The Siddhas.
Every soul that has ever got free, at the crown of the universe, without body, form, or any relation to what is below. They are drawn as an empty human outline because shape is all that is left of the last body. They will never return and cannot be asked for anything.
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Gods & powers — the presences it names and addresses
T
The yakshis.
Padmavati, Ambika, Chakreshvari — multi-armed guardian deities standing at the feet of the Tirthankara images, and, unlike the Tirthankaras, held to actually respond. Reformists point out that a religion founded on the uselessness of petition has ended up with an entire tier of petitionable beings. The queues are at the yakshis.
⚖ contested within
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Founders & teachers — the ones who opened the way
M
Mahavira — the ford-maker.
Not a founder but the 24th in a line of teachers who found the crossing: he showed the ford over the river of rebirth, then crossed it himself.
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R
Rishabhanatha — the first.
The first Tirthankara of this descending age, who is said to have taught agriculture, fire, writing, pottery and the seventy-two arts to people who had never needed them before — and then renounced all of it. His mother was liberated before he was. The Rigveda names a Rishabha, and Jains read that as evidence of their own antiquity.
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P
Parshvanatha — the one before.
The 23rd Tirthankara, historical and earlier: Jainism's own evidence that its path was walked before Mahavira taught it.
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N
Neminatha.
The twenty-second Tirthankara, and in the Jain telling a cousin of Krishna — the one place where the two epic worlds touch, with Krishna present as a relative and not a god. He is enshrined at Girnar in Gujarat, and his story is the one Gujarati folk song returns to.
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K
Kundakunda.
The Digambara philosopher who turned the tradition inward: in his account the soul is untouched by karma, by the body, and even by the vows, all of which belong to a lower standpoint of description. Every modern Jain movement that emphasises realisation over ritual traces itself to him, and nobody can agree what century he lived in.
⚖ contested within
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S
Shrimad Rajchandra.
A Bombay jeweller with a prodigious memory who was also a mystic and who died at thirty-three. Gandhi met him in 1891, wrote to him from South Africa with a list of questions about religion, and named him alongside Tolstoy and Ruskin as the three moderns who shaped him — which is the route by which Jain ahimsa reached the independence movement and, later, the American South.
held by most
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Saints & exemplars — lives held up as the pattern
B
Bahubali.
He is not a Tirthankara and he is the most photographed thing in Jainism: a seventeen-metre naked figure carved from a single rock at Shravanabelagola around 981, with stone vines climbing his legs to show how long he stood still. He won the fight and then would not take the kingdom.
⚖ contested within
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M
Marudevi on the elephant.
Rishabhanatha's mother grieved his renunciation for a thousand years and went blind from weeping. Riding an elephant to see him restored to glory, she understood on the way what the whole thing had been about, and was liberated where she sat — the first soul freed in this half-cycle, with no vows, no fasts and no initiation.
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C
Chandanbala.
A princess sold into slavery, shackled, her head shaved, with nothing to offer but boiled lentils in a winnowing basket — which happened to satisfy every one of the thirteen conditions Mahavira had silently vowed before he would break a fast of five months and twenty-five days. She became the head of an order of nuns that outnumbered the monks two to one.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
Every soul is already omniscient.
Not potentially — actually, and buried. The soul in its own nature has infinite knowledge, infinite perception, infinite bliss and infinite energy, and karma is the dirt on the lamp. Nothing is added by the path; something is removed.
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Non-violence is the highest duty.
Ahimsa extends to every living being — the monk sweeps the path before stepping.
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Karma is a substance.
Not a moral ledger and not a law of consequence — fine physical matter, drawn to the soul by passion and stuck there by it, with a measurable weight, duration and intensity. This is the distinctive Jain claim, and the technical literature on it runs to thousands of pages.
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Truth has many sides.
Anekantavada: every view is partial; certainty about the whole is a category error.
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Syadvada — the sevenfold answer.
Every statement is prefixed with syat, in some respect. From some standpoint it is; from some standpoint it is not; from some standpoint it is and is not; from some standpoint it is indescribable — and three combinations of those. It is a formal logic for holding partial truths without collapsing them.
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The soul is liberated by its own effort.
No god saves; austerity and care burn karma from the soul until it rises free.
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Nobody made the universe.
It has always existed and will not end. There is no creator, no first cause, no sustainer and nobody to appeal to, and Jain philosophers spent centuries arguing the case against Hindu and Buddhist theists in detail — chiefly that a creator would need a motive, and any motive implies a lack.
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The Tirthankaras cannot help you.
A liberated soul is out of the system entirely — no body, no location in the world, no perception of it and no capacity to act in it. The tradition states this flatly and then worships them anyway, because the veneration works on the venerator. It is one of the more intellectually honest arrangements in religion.
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Life is everywhere, and it is graded.
Souls occupy earth, water, fire, air and plants with one sense; worms with two; ants with three; bees with four; humans, animals and gods with five. The whole ethic follows from the count — you may not avoid killing one-sensed beings, but you may weight your life to kill fewer and lower.
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Time is a wheel with no beginning.
Six ascending ages and six descending ones, turning forever. We are in the fifth descending age; things are getting worse, liberation from here is no longer possible, and the next Tirthankara is a very long way off. The tradition's account of the present is unusually bleak and it does not soften it.
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The soul is the shape of the body it fills.
It expands and contracts to fit — an elephant's soul fills an elephant, an ant's fills an ant, and the same soul does both across lives. It is not a point and not everywhere; it is exactly as big as what it is currently living in.
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Ahimsa reaches past the act.
You are bound by doing it, by causing it, and by approving it — through mind, speech and body, which makes nine combinations, and the texts enumerate all nine. Intending harm binds karma whether or not anything happens, which is why the vows are about the interior as much as the hands.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Whether a woman can be liberated from a woman's body.
Svetambaras say yes and hold that the nineteenth Tirthankara, Malli, was a woman. Digambaras say no — liberation requires complete nudity, nudity is not possible for a woman, and a female soul must be reborn male first. This is the sharpest doctrinal division in Jainism and it has never been resolved.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
An eternal universe of countless souls, each capable of liberation
After death
Rebirth, until the soul rises free of karma