The Cousin of Krishna

Neminatha, also Arishtanemi, is the twenty-second Tirthankara of the present age, and the ford-maker whose story most closely touches the wider world of Indian legend. Jain tradition sets him in the Yadava lineage as a cousin of Krishna: he is made the son of Samudravijaya, a brother of Krishna's father Vasudeva, so that the Jain ford-maker and the Hindu deity move through the same narrative world. His emblem is the conch shell (shankha), an attribute he shares with the Krishna cycle.

This intersection is preserved on both sides, Jain accounts of Neminatha and the Krishna legends overlap in cast and setting, and it is a meeting of two living traditions' sacred narratives rather than a datum of documented history. It gives Neminatha a distinctive place among the ford-makers, bound into the great cycle of tales that Jains and Hindus have long told of the same age.