A Jain image of a Tirthankara is deliberately unindividuated. The figure is seated in lotus posture or standing in the kayotsarga pose of bodily abandonment, the face is emptied of expression, and the body carries none of the marks by which portraiture works, because what is being shown is a soul at liberation rather than a man with a biography. Twenty-four figures rendered on that principle would be indistinguishable, and so each carries a lanchana: a small emblem carved beneath the seat, a bull for the first, a serpent for the twenty-third, a lion for the twenty-fourth. The emblem is not decoration. It is the identification, and for most of the twenty-four it is the only one.
The two main traditions give the same emblem for eighteen of the twenty-four and differ over six, among them the fifth, the seventh and the eighteenth. The atlas records both forms rather than choosing, because choosing would mean the atlas asserting one sectarian convention in its own voice.
The deepest disagreement is not about an emblem. The nineteenth of the series is Malli in the Svetambara canon, a woman, and Mallinatha in the Digambara, a man, and the difference follows from a doctrinal question about whether liberation can be attained from a female body. Each tradition reads its own canon consistently and neither has conceded. Beside that, a further division runs through the whole series: critical scholarship accepts Parshvanatha and Mahavira as historical figures and reads the preceding twenty-two as belonging to the cosmological scheme, while Jain tradition draws no such line at all. Both readings are recorded here, side by side, because the atlas has no standing to settle either.