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The Seventh Ford-Maker

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The Seventh Ford-Maker

Suparshvanatha is the seventh Tirthankara of the present age, venerated as a liberated soul and omniscient teacher of the path of non-violence and detachment. His emblem is the svastika, one of the most ancient of Jain auspicious symbols, in the tradition its four arms are read as the four states into which a soul may be reborn (heavenly, human, animal or plant, and infernal), a reminder of the wandering the ford-maker teaches one to end.

Jains count him among the twenty-four ford-makers of the current avasarpini and hold that he attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). Like the other early ford-makers he belongs to Jain sacred history rather than the documented past, and the sources preserve little narrative particular to him beyond his emblem and traditional attributes.

Jain tradition assigns each Tirthankara a specific height and a specific total lifespan, both said to decrease steadily across the ford-makers of a descending age as the moral and physical condition of the world itself declines, a cosmological pattern the texts apply to the whole sequence of twenty-four rather than to any one figure alone. Suparshvanatha's own place within that declining sequence is recorded in the canon; beyond it, and beyond the svastika emblem and its traditional reading already given, the sources preserve no further narrative particular to him.

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