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The Thirteenth Ford-Maker

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The Thirteenth Ford-Maker

Vimalanatha is the thirteenth Tirthankara of the present age, his name meaning "the spotless" or "the pure" (vimala). His emblem is the boar. He is venerated as a fully liberated, omniscient ford-maker of the current avasarpini who taught the eternal path across the ocean of rebirth.

Jain tradition places him in the sacred antiquity of the age, before the reach of documented history, and holds that he attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). Beyond his emblem, his name and the traditional framework of the five auspicious life-events, the sources preserve little narrative particular to him.

Vimalanatha's boar emblem places him among a minority of Tirthankaras identified by land animals rather than by the more common lotus, elephant or lion; Jain iconographic manuals treat the choice of emblem as fixed by scriptural tradition for each ford-maker individually rather than as a system with any evident underlying logic connecting a Tirthankara's name, era or teaching to the creature or object assigned him, a point on which the received texts themselves offer no explanation and later commentators, across many centuries of Jain scholastic writing, have never managed to agree among themselves.

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