The Earliest Ford-Maker History Reaches

Parshvanatha (or Parshva) is the twenty-third Tirthankara and the earliest of the ford-makers whom historians are generally willing to accept as a real person. He is conventionally placed in the ninth to seventh centuries BCE; Jain tradition dates him 877-777 BCE, some two and a half centuries before Mahavira. With Parshva, in other words, the sequence of ford-makers passes from Jain sacred cosmology into the edge of documented history, though even here the detail of his life remains traditional rather than independently attested.

The tradition remembers him as a prince of Varanasi (Kashi), son of King Ashvasena and Queen Vama, who renounced his rank to seek liberation. His emblem is the serpent. The distinction between him and the twenty-two ford-makers before him is worth keeping clear: those are figures of Jain tradition and cosmology, set in a legendary antiquity; Parshva stands where tradition and history begin to meet.