Jain tradition holds that Mahavira, the twenty fourth and final Tirthankara of the current cosmic cycle, was born Vardhamana, a prince of the Ikshvaku dynasty, at Kundagrama near Vaishali, in present day Bihar, to King Siddhartha and Queen Trishala. Svetambara tradition places his birth in 599 BCE, and both major branches of Jainism describe his childhood as marked by early signs of exceptional spiritual capacity, though the two traditions differ in numerous details of the surrounding narrative, including the circumstances of his family life and, notably, whether he married before renouncing worldly life, which Svetambara tradition affirms and Digambara tradition denies.
According to tradition, Vardhamana renounced his princely life at around the age of thirty, following the death of his parents, and undertook twelve years of severe ascetic practice before attaining kevala jnana, complete and unobstructed knowledge, after which he was known as Mahavira, meaning great hero, and began teaching the path that would develop into organized Jainism.
His traditional biography positions him as a close contemporary of the Buddha, both figures active in roughly the same region of northeastern India during a period of considerable religious ferment and the emergence of new ascetic movements challenging the authority of Vedic Brahmanical religion.