Mahavira, "Great Hero," a title rather than a birth-name, is the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the present age and the central figure of Jainism as a living tradition. He was born Vardhamana into a kshatriya family of the Jnatrika clan at Kundagrama, near Vaishali in present-day Bihar, to (in the Svetambara account) King Siddhartha and Queen Trishala; his emblem is the lion.
At about the age of thirty, Jain accounts relate, he renounced his princely life and undertook some twelve years of severe asceticism and meditation, at the end of which he attained kevala jnana, infinite, omniscient knowledge, and became a Jina, a "Conqueror" of the passions and of the cycle of rebirth (from which word the whole tradition, Jainism, takes its name). He then gathered and taught a fourfold community and eleven chief disciples, the ganadharas, foremost among them Indrabhuti Gautama. Crucially, Mahavira is not the founder of Jainism ex nihilo but the reformer and re-establisher of the far older teaching of his predecessor Parshvanatha.