Another Emperor Who Set Down His Crown

Kunthunatha, the seventeenth Tirthankara, is another of the small number of figures in the sequence credited by Jain tradition with having also held the exalted status of a Chakravartin, a universal ruler over the known world, before renouncing that position in favour of spiritual liberation, placing him alongside Shantinatha as an example of the tradition's recurring theme that the highest worldly power is itself something to be set aside on the path to liberation. This dual role, temporal sovereign and later spiritual teacher, gives Kunthunatha somewhat more developed narrative material within Jain hagiographic literature than figures who held only the Tirthankara role, since his story has to account for both a reign and a renunciation of that reign.

As with the broader sequence of Tirthankaras earlier than Parshvanatha and Mahavira, however, this material belongs to the internal cosmological chronology of Jain tradition, situated in an age far outside anything historians have independent means to verify, and scholars generally treat the Chakravartin narratives attached to figures like Kunthunatha as part of the tradition's doctrinal emphasis on renunciation's supreme value rather than as claims open to the kind of historical corroboration available for the tradition's latest and most firmly attested teacher.