Chandanbala's story is central to Svetambara Paryushana recitation and it is grim before it is triumphant. Born Vasumati, a princess of Champa, she was taken when her city fell, sold, and bought by a merchant of Kaushambi whose wife, jealous, had her head shaved, her feet shackled, and shut her in a cellar with nothing but boiled horse-lentils in a winnowing basket. Mahavira meanwhile had taken an abhigraha, an unspoken vow with thirteen simultaneous conditions before he would accept food, and had been fasting for five months and twenty-five days. Every condition — a princess, enslaved, shackled, shaved, one foot inside the threshold and one outside, at the wrong hour, offering boiled lentils in a winnowing basket, weeping — happened to describe her exactly, except that she was not weeping. He turned to go; she wept at the loss of the chance to give; he returned. She became his first female disciple and head of the order of nuns, which Svetambara sources number at 36,000 against 14,000 monks. A tradition that records a two-to-one female majority among its mendicants and then argues about whether women can be liberated is holding two things at once.