Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara recognized by Jain tradition, is said to have renounced his household at about the age of thirty and spent the following twelve years in severe ascetic practice, wandering largely without shelter or a fixed home, observing long fasts, and enduring hardship and insult without responding to either. Jain scripture and later hagiography describe this period as a deliberate program of shedding karmic matter believed to bind the soul and obscure its natural capacity for perfect knowledge.
Tradition places the moment of Mahavira's enlightenment, kevala jnana, in his forty-third year, achieved while he sat in meditation on the bank of the river Rijupalika near the village of Jrimbhikagrama. From that point, Jain accounts describe him as possessing complete and unobstructed knowledge of all substances, in every place and time, a state distinct from ordinary understanding and not subject to further growth or error.
Mahavira is said to have preached his first sermon shortly afterward, though early sources differ on whether it was immediately understood, and to have ordained eleven learned Brahmins as his chief disciples, the ganadharas, who organized his growing following into a fourfold community of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, a structure Jain communities still use to describe their own membership today.