The five mahavratas

The five mahavratas, great vows, are the commitments taken by Jain mendicants: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, chastity and non-possession. Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Tirthankara, is traditionally credited with four; Mahavira is said to have separated out chastity as a distinct fifth. That the tradition itself records this development is notable, since it is one of the few points at which Jain sources acknowledge doctrinal change, and it has accordingly attracted scholarly attention as possible evidence of a real historical succession.

Taken as mahavratas the vows are absolute and unqualified. They apply to all beings, at all times, in thought, speech and act, and they cover doing, causing another to do, and approving of what is done. That threefold-by-threefold structure produces the exhaustive coverage intended, and it is why mendicant life is regulated in such fine detail: the vows can be broken by carelessness and not only by intention.

Laypeople take the same five as anuvratas, lesser vows, limited in scope. Non-violence for a householder excludes intentional harm to mobile beings while accommodating the unavoidable harm of ordinary occupation; non-possession becomes a voluntary ceiling set on wealth and belongings rather than their complete renunciation. The lay code adds three reinforcing vows limiting travel, activity and consumption, and four vows of spiritual discipline, and the eleven pratimas arrange the whole into an ascending ladder that a householder may climb as far as they are able.

Two features deserve notice. Non-possession extends beyond property to attachment as such, including attachment to opinions, a connection Jain writers draw explicitly, linking the fifth vow to anekantavada, so that dogmatic insistence on one's own view becomes a species of grasping. And the Digambara insistence that complete non-possession requires nudity for the highest mendicants, against the Svetambara acceptance of white robes, is the visible marker of the tradition's principal division and follows directly from how absolutely the fifth vow is read.

The parallel with Patanjali's five yamas, the same five restraints, in the same order, is exact. The direction of influence between the Jain and yogic formulations is debated, and the likeliest account is that both draw on a common ascetic culture of the period rather than one borrowing from the other.

The tradition's own account that Parshvanatha taught four vows later expanded to five by Mahavira rests on treating Parshvanatha as a real historical predecessor rather than a legendary figure, and this is one of the relatively rare points in ancient Indian religious history where mainstream scholarship extends qualified credence to a traditional claim of this kind.

Jain tradition places Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Tirthankara, roughly two hundred fifty years before Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last, giving him a traditional date in the ninth century BCE, earlier than the sixth or fifth-century BCE dates modern historians generally assign to Mahavira from comparative chronology with early Buddhist sources. A number of historians of ancient India, including several who otherwise treat Jain hagiography with caution, judge Parshvanatha more likely than not to have been a real teacher who led an ascetic community distinct from Mahavira's, partly because Jain and Buddhist texts both mention followers of Parshvanatha as an already-existing group at the time of Mahavira's own activity, including an episode where Mahavira's own parents are described as adherents of Parshvanatha's community before their son's teaching began, a detail scholars regard as unlikely to have been invented since it subordinates Mahavira's novelty rather than enhancing it.

If this reading is correct, the difference between four vows and five becomes evidence of doctrinal development within a continuous ascetic lineage rather than legendary elaboration, which is why historians treat the Parshvanatha material more seriously than comparably early material in several other South Asian traditions, where no comparable external corroboration exists.