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.
Rishabhanatha, or Adinatha, is the first Tirthankara of the present descending half-cycle and the accounts of him are essentially a civilisational origin story. Humanity had lived off wish-fulfilling trees; as the age declined the trees failed, and Rishabha taught agriculture, fire, cooking, pottery, weaving, writing, arithmetic and the seventy-two arts, established law and marriage, and ruled as the first king — and then renounced the lot and became the first monk anyone had seen. His sons Bharata and Bahubali are central to the subsequent stories, and India is called Bharatavarsha after the former in Jain reckoning. The Rigveda contains references to a Rishabha and to vratya ascetics, and Jains have long cited these as evidence that the shramana tradition is at least as old as the Vedic one rather than a later heterodox breakaway — a claim with real scholarly support from the Indus Valley material, where standing figures in what look like kayotsarga posture have been read as evidence, contentiously, of a pre-Vedic ascetic tradition. His emblem is the bull.
The same ground, other faiths
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