Marudevi is Rishabhanatha's mother and her liberation is recorded in a handful of lines that carry disproportionate weight. When her son renounced she grieved without relief; the traditional figure is a thousand years, and she is said to have lost her sight from weeping. When word came that he had attained kevala jnana and was seated in the samavasarana surrounded by gods and kings, Bharata took her out on an elephant to see him restored. On the journey — before arriving, in some tellings on hearing the sound of the celestial assembly — understanding came: she saw the nature of the attachment she had been suffering from, saw what her son had actually done and why, and attained omniscience and immediately liberation, on the elephant. She thus became the first siddha of this half-cycle, ahead of her son. She had taken no vows, kept no fast, performed no austerity, had no teacher and belonged to no order, because none of these existed yet. Jain teachers cite her precisely against the assumption that the machinery is what liberates. It is the one place a religion with no grace in it produces something that looks very much like grace.