Rishabhanatha

Rishabhanatha, also Adinatha, the "First Lord," or simply Rishabha, is the first of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, the "ford-makers" who, in each descending world-age, rediscover and teach the path across the ocean of rebirth. In the reckoning of time Jains hold to, he opens the present avasarpini, the current descending half-cycle, and his emblem is the bull.

The tradition places him at the very dawn of civilisation and gives him a distinctive double role. Before he is a renouncer he is a culture-founder: when the kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling trees that had sustained an earlier, effortless age, ceased to provide, Rishabha is said to have taught humankind the arts of survival and society, agriculture, fire, crafts, writing, arithmetic, law and kingship, and only then to have renounced his own sovereignty to seek liberation. Jain accounts name his birthplace as Ayodhya, his parents as King Nabhi and Queen Marudevi, and himself as the founder of the Ikshvaku dynasty.

This belongs to Jain sacred history, not to the documented past. Rishabha is set in a remote, prehistoric antiquity, and the immense lifespans and stature the texts assign the ford-makers of that age are read within the tradition's cosmology rather than as historical record.

Jain narrative surrounds Rishabha with a large family whose stories carry much of the tradition's early meaning. His son Bharata is remembered as the first chakravartin, the universal emperor of the age, and one account derives the very name of the land, Bharata, India, from him.

Another son, Bahubali, is the subject of one of Jainism's most beloved episodes and its most striking monument. Having contested sovereignty with his brother Bharata and won, Bahubali is said to have recoiled from the victory, renounced the world, and stood in motionless meditation so long that vines grew up his limbs, attaining liberation through the final surrender of pride. His figure is carved in the colossal fifty-seven-foot monolith of Gommateshvara at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, bathed every twelve years in the great Mahamastakabhisheka ceremony, and it remains one of the tradition's foremost pilgrimage images. Rishabha's own breaking of a long fast with a gift of sugarcane juice is commemorated by Jains at Akshaya Tritiya.

Rishabhanatha attained kevala jnana, infinite omniscient knowledge, and by tradition final liberation (moksha) on Mount Ashtapada, a peak some accounts identify with Kailash. As the ford-maker who first revealed the Jain dharma in this age, he is deeply revered across both of the tradition's great communities, the Digambara and the Svetambara, and he is among the most frequently depicted of the Tirthankaras in Jain art, recognisable by the bull beneath his image and, often, by locks of hair falling to his shoulders.

His significance is confessional and cosmological rather than historical: he stands at the head of the sequence of teachers by which Jains understand their tradition to have been transmitted from time out of mind. The historical record cannot reach a figure so placed, and the tradition itself does not present him as a person of documented history but as the primordial founder of the path.