The Fourfold Restraint, and the Nirgranthas

Parshva is remembered as teaching a fourfold restraint (chaturyama): non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, and non-possession. His followers were known as the Nirgranthas, "the unbound" or "those without knots", a name that attaches to the Jain community in the earliest external references to it.

The relation between Parshva's teaching and Mahavira's is one of the more historically substantial points in Jain tradition. Mahavira, born some generations later into a family that followed Parshva's path, is understood to have reformed and extended that older tradition, adding to the four restraints the explicit fifth vow of celibacy (brahmacharya) and giving Jain monastic life its stricter, definitive form. The Svetambara canon preserves, in the Kesi-Gautama dialogue, an account of followers of the two teachers reconciling the difference between four vows and five, a text scholars read as a memory of the actual continuity between Parshva's community and Mahavira's.