Renunciation did not bring Bahubali immediate enlightenment. Jain tradition recounts that pride, precisely the quality his final act of mercy in the wrestling match seemed to have overcome, kept him from breaking through: he could not bring himself to bow before his younger brothers, who had renounced the world and become ascetics before him, because he had, after all, defeated their older brother Bharata in combat and would not humble himself before his juniors. He stood in unbroken meditation for a full year to master that residual pride, so still that vines grew up his legs and arms and birds nested in the tangle, an image reproduced literally in the Shravanabelagola statue's carved creepers.
Enlightenment came only when his sisters, also ascetics, visited and told him gently that he could not attain liberation while still mounted, figuratively, on the elephant of his own pride, since a monk on an elephant is still above those he refuses to greet. The remark broke the deadlock; Bahubali stepped down from his pride as if dismounting, bowed, and attained omniscience on the spot. The story is read across Jain commentary as a demonstration that renunciation of a throne is necessary but not sufficient, that the subtlest attachment, to one's own moral victory, can outlast every visible one, and it remains the doctrinal core of why the towering statue at Shravanabelagola shows a king who had already given everything away still working to let go of the last thing he had left.