Figures
who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Part of Belief →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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