Mahavira

Mahavira, "Great Hero," a title rather than a birth-name, is the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the present age and the central figure of Jainism as a living tradition. He was born Vardhamana into a kshatriya family of the Jnatrika clan at Kundagrama, near Vaishali in present-day Bihar, to (in the Svetambara account) King Siddhartha and Queen Trishala; his emblem is the lion.

At about the age of thirty, Jain accounts relate, he renounced his princely life and undertook some twelve years of severe asceticism and meditation, at the end of which he attained kevala jnana, infinite, omniscient knowledge, and became a Jina, a "Conqueror" of the passions and of the cycle of rebirth (from which word the whole tradition, Jainism, takes its name). He then gathered and taught a fourfold community and eleven chief disciples, the ganadharas, foremost among them Indrabhuti Gautama. Crucially, Mahavira is not the founder of Jainism ex nihilo but the reformer and re-establisher of the far older teaching of his predecessor Parshvanatha.

Mahavira is a historical figure, but his dates are not settled, and the disagreement runs along both confessional and scholarly lines. The Svetambara tradition dates him 599-527 BCE; the Digambara place his final liberation in 510 BCE. Most modern historians, noting that he was very likely a near-contemporary of the Buddha and following recent redatings of the Buddha's own life, place him somewhat later than the traditional figures, broadly in the fifth century BCE.

The tradition marks the two ends of his life with major observances: his birth at Mahavir Jayanti, and his passing, his attainment of final liberation (moksha) at Pava (Pavapuri), at Diwali, which Jains keep as the anniversary of his nirvana. In presenting him it is worth holding the confessional datings and the historical-critical estimate distinctly: the traditional years carry religious authority within the community, while the historians' range reflects the comparative evidence.

The doctrines transmitted in Mahavira's name remain the foundation of Jain thought. At their centre is ahimsa, non-violence extended, more radically than in any neighbouring tradition, to every living being (jiva), including the minute lives of water, air, fire, earth and plants. From it follow the five great vows (mahavratas) of the ascetic: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, celibacy and non-possession (aparigraha).

Two further teachings are distinctively his. Anekantavada, the doctrine of "non-onesidedness," holds that reality is many-sided and that any single statement captures only one standpoint upon it, expressed in the method of syadvada, the qualified "in some respect" that guards every assertion. And the Jain analysis of the soul and karma understands karma as a subtle material substance that adheres to the soul through action and passion, so that liberation is the shedding of that accumulated matter and the soul's rise to its own perfected nature. Mahavira is venerated not as a god or creator, Jainism has none, but as a perfected, liberated soul and supreme exemplar of the path.

Within a few centuries of Mahavira the community divided into the two branches it retains today, the Svetambara ("white-clad") and the Digambara ("sky-clad"). Their differences bear directly on how Mahavira is remembered: the Digambara hold that the fully renounced ascetic, following Mahavira, goes naked, that a true kevalin no longer takes food, and that a woman cannot attain liberation in her present body; the Svetambara clothe their monks, hold that the omniscient still eat, affirm that women can be liberated, and preserve a biography in which Mahavira married (to Yashoda) and had a daughter, where the Digambara hold him a lifelong celibate. The branches also differ over the scriptures: the Svetambara Agamas, the canonical texts, are rejected as authentic by the Digambara, who hold the original canon lost.

Jainism today numbers on the order of four to five million adherents, concentrated in India but present worldwide, and Mahavira's radical non-violence, his anekantavada, and his ethic of non-possession continue to shape a living community that reveres him each year at Mahavir Jayanti as the great hero who gave the eternal teaching its enduring form.