Tirthankara

The word is literal before it is theological. A tirtha is a ford, the shallow place where a river can be waded, and a Tirthankara is the one who makes it. What is forded is samsara, the stream of birth and death, and the crossing that is built is not a doctrine but a community: the fourfold order of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, which Jainism calls the tirtha itself. This is the whole content of the title. A Tirthankara is not the one who knows, because omniscience is shared with every soul that reaches liberation, and it is not the one who founds, because Jainism holds its teaching to be beginningless and merely rediscovered. It is the one who builds the crossing and leaves it standing for others.

The consequence is a form of veneration that is regularly misdescribed. A Jain who bows before the image of a Tirthankara is not petitioning him. A liberated soul is held to be wholly beyond action in the world, incapable of hearing a request and incapable of granting it; the reverence is directed at what the figure achieved and models, and the benefit is understood to arise in the one who reveres. Summaries that call Jainism atheistic and summaries that call Jain temple worship prayer are both reaching for the wrong category, and the difference between them is exactly this.

Twenty-four are counted for the present descending half-cycle of time, from Rishabhanatha to Mahavira. Twenty-four is not a total: Jain cosmology gives each ascending and descending half-cycle its own twenty-four, so the number describes an era rather than the history of the universe. Within the era the sequence is fixed, and Digambara and Svetambara, who disagree about a great deal, do not disagree about it.

A Jain image of a Tirthankara is deliberately unindividuated. The figure is seated in lotus posture or standing in the kayotsarga pose of bodily abandonment, the face is emptied of expression, and the body carries none of the marks by which portraiture works, because what is being shown is a soul at liberation rather than a man with a biography. Twenty-four figures rendered on that principle would be indistinguishable, and so each carries a lanchana: a small emblem carved beneath the seat, a bull for the first, a serpent for the twenty-third, a lion for the twenty-fourth. The emblem is not decoration. It is the identification, and for most of the twenty-four it is the only one.

The two main traditions give the same emblem for eighteen of the twenty-four and differ over six, among them the fifth, the seventh and the eighteenth. The atlas records both forms rather than choosing, because choosing would mean the atlas asserting one sectarian convention in its own voice.

The deepest disagreement is not about an emblem. The nineteenth of the series is Malli in the Svetambara canon, a woman, and Mallinatha in the Digambara, a man, and the difference follows from a doctrinal question about whether liberation can be attained from a female body. Each tradition reads its own canon consistently and neither has conceded. Beside that, a further division runs through the whole series: critical scholarship accepts Parshvanatha and Mahavira as historical figures and reads the preceding twenty-two as belonging to the cosmological scheme, while Jain tradition draws no such line at all. Both readings are recorded here, side by side, because the atlas has no standing to settle either.