Lives of the Tirthankaras

The Kalpa Sutra is one of the most revered scriptures of the Svetambara Jain tradition, a work concerned above all with the lives of the Tirthankaras, the "ford-makers," the great enlightened teachers who in each cosmic age reveal the path across the ocean of rebirth. Attributed by tradition to Bhadrabahu, an elder said to have lived some two centuries after Mahavira, the text as it stands was compiled somewhat later. Its heart is a detailed biography of Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the present age and the historical founder-figure of Jainism as it now exists: his conception and the auspicious dreams of his mother, his birth, his renunciation of princely life, the long years of severe austerity by which he attained omniscience (kevala-jnana), and his final liberation. It then gives briefer lives of the Tirthankaras Parshvanatha, Neminatha and Rishabha, the first of the age, and concludes with a list of the succession of Jain monastic teachers and a section on the rules of monastic conduct during the rainy-season retreat.