The date most Jain communities use for Mahavira's death, 527 BCE, comes from a traditional chronology recorded in Jain scripture and maintained continuously within the community's own calendar and festival calculations. Some modern historians have challenged this date, arguing instead for a period closer to 425 or 400 BCE, a revision driven largely by comparison with the more securely established chronology of the Buddha's life and death, since early Buddhist and Jain texts describe the two teachers as approximate contemporaries whose followers sometimes crossed paths.
If the revised chronology is correct, Mahavira's death would fall closer to the Buddha's own traditional or revised dates than the older Jain calculation implies, which would tighten rather than widen the gap between the two teachers' lifetimes as usually described. Supporters of the traditional date note that it has centuries of internal continuity behind it and question whether comparative dating against a separate, also disputed, Buddhist chronology is a sound basis for revision.
Neither position commands full scholarly consensus, and the disagreement illustrates a broader pattern in the study of ancient South Asian religious history, where internally consistent traditional chronologies and externally cross referenced historical reconstructions frequently produce different results that current evidence cannot fully reconcile.