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The Second Ford-Maker

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The Second Ford-Maker

Ajitanatha is the second Tirthankara of the present age, and his name means "the unconquered", one whom the passions could not master. His emblem is the elephant. Jain tradition places him, like the ford-makers between Rishabha and the historical Parshva, in a remote sacred antiquity of the current avasarpini, and honours him as a fully liberated soul (siddha) and omniscient teacher who reopened the path across the ocean of rebirth.

As with each Tirthankara, his life is marked by the five auspicious events (panch kalyanaka), conception, birth, renunciation, the attainment of omniscience, and final liberation, that structure Jain devotion, and he is held to have attained moksha, with twenty of the twenty-four ford-makers, at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji, Parasnath Hill in present-day Jharkhand), the greatest of Jain pilgrimage mountains. He belongs to Jain sacred history rather than to the documented past.

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