Giving away wealth

At a Glance

Central figures: Vardhamana (later known as Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara), and the people of Kundagrama who received his gifts during the great renunciation charity.
Setting: The city of Kundagrama in the Vajji confederacy of northeast India, in the period before Vardhamana’s renunciation at age thirty.
The turn: After receiving permission from his elder brother Nandivardhana, Vardhamana spent an entire year distributing every piece of his personal wealth - gold, silver, jewels, grain, cattle, cloth - to anyone who came to his gates.
The outcome: At the end of the year-long giving, Vardhamana owned nothing. He pulled his hair out in five handfuls, dressed in a single garment, and walked out of Kundagrama to begin twelve years of silent wandering and austerity.
The legacy: The year of charity became the model for dana (giving) in Jain practice, and the event is commemorated during Diksha Kalyanak, the celebration of Mahavira’s renunciation, observed by Jain communities as one of the five auspicious events of his life.

The line at Vardhamana’s gate started before dawn.

They came with empty hands and left with full ones. Farmers who had lost a harvest to drought. Widows with children. Craftsmen whose tools had broken. Brahmins and kshatriyas and people who belonged to no caste at all. The prince did not ask who they were. He did not ask what they needed the gold for. He sat in the open courtyard of his family’s house in Kundagrama and gave away everything he had, piece by piece, day after day, for a full year.

His servants carried out the goods. Bolts of silk dyed in saffron and indigo. Copper vessels and silver plates. Sacks of rice and barley. Cattle - good milking cows with their calves. Horses. The jeweled ornaments his mother Trishala had worn at court. His father Siddhartha’s carved ivory seat. Every object that could be lifted, counted, and placed in another person’s hands went out through the gates.

The Year of Giving

The charity was called Varshidan - the year-long gift. It was deliberate, not impulsive. Vardhamana had been planning this since his parents’ deaths. Both Siddhartha and Trishala had died when he was in his late twenties, and he had made them a promise: he would not leave the household while they lived. Now they were gone, and the promise was fulfilled, and the thing he had known since boyhood - that he would renounce the world - was finally possible.

But he did not simply walk away. Jain tradition is precise about this. He spent twelve months emptying the treasury. The giving was systematic. Different categories of goods went out on different days. Some accounts say he distributed wealth for 365 consecutive days without missing one. Others say the giving lasted a year but was organized by the lunar calendar, with special distributions on auspicious dates.

The practical effect was enormous. Kundagrama was a modest city in the Vajji republic, not a great capital. The wealth of a prince’s household, distributed across its population, changed the material life of the place. People who had not eaten meat in months because they could not afford grain suddenly had enough. People who had walked barefoot received sandals. Vardhamana gave without conditions, without lectures, without asking recipients to follow any particular path. The giving was the act. The act was complete in itself.

Nandivardhana’s Grief

His elder brother Nandivardhana watched this happen and could not stop it.

Nandivardhana was the head of the household now. He was older, married, settled into the duties of a nobleman in the Vajji confederacy. He loved his brother. When Vardhamana came to him and asked formal permission to renounce, Nandivardhana wept. He asked Vardhamana to stay two more years. Vardhamana agreed to stay two more years. Then Nandivardhana asked again for one more year. Then another. The accounts vary on how long this negotiation took - some say Nandivardhana delayed the renunciation for two full years, others say less.

But eventually Nandivardhana gave permission. He could see that Vardhamana’s decision was not a mood or a crisis. It was the settled direction of a mind that had been turning toward this for a lifetime. To hold him any longer would have been cruelty.

So the wealth went out. And Nandivardhana stood in the courtyard and watched his brother’s possessions leave the house in strangers’ arms, and said nothing.

The Last Garment

On the day the giving ended, Vardhamana had one garment left. Some Svetambara sources say he kept a single piece of cloth - a white robe that he wore when he walked out of the city. Digambara tradition says he left entirely naked, having discarded even that last covering within days or immediately. The disagreement between the two great Jain sects on this point runs deep and remains unresolved, but both agree on the essential fact: he kept nothing.

Before he left, he pulled his hair out. Not shaved - pulled. In five handfuls. This is the kesha-loch, the ritual hair-pulling that marks the Jain renunciant’s departure from vanity, comfort, and attachment to the body. It is painful. It is meant to be painful. Vardhamana did not flinch. He stood in the courtyard of his family home and tore the hair from his own head in five deliberate fistfuls, and the hair fell to the ground, and Indra - the king of the devas - is said to have gathered it up, because even the gods honored what was happening.

Walking Out of Kundagrama

He left on the tenth day of the bright half of the month of Margashirsha. He was thirty years old. He walked east, barefoot, into the forests and villages of the Vajji territory, and he did not speak.

For twelve years and six months he wandered. He ate almost nothing. He slept in the open - in cremation grounds, under trees, in abandoned buildings. People threw stones at him. Dogs bit him. He did not retaliate. He did not complain. He moved through the landscape of northeast India like a man who had already left the world and was simply waiting for the world to notice.

The wealth he had given away stayed given. It did not come back. It did not follow him. The cows he had distributed calved and gave milk in other people’s barns. The grain he had handed out was eaten and became the bodies of other people’s children. The silk was worn and torn and patched and worn again. None of it was wasted, and none of it mattered to Vardhamana anymore - not because he had learned to let go of it, but because he had never held it the way other people hold things. The year of giving was not a sacrifice. It was a correction. The wealth had never been his. He was returning it to the world it came from.

Kevala Jnana on the Rijupalika

After those twelve and a half years of silence and austerity, Vardhamana sat on the northern bank of the Rijupalika River, near the town of Jrimbhikagrama, under a sala tree. He was in deep meditation, squatting in the godohika posture, fasting, motionless. And on the tenth day of the bright half of Vaishakha, in the early hours before dawn, he attained Kevala Jnana - complete, infinite, unobstructed knowledge of all things past, present, and future, in all worlds, for all time.

He was forty-two years old. He had nothing. He owned nothing. He wore nothing, or almost nothing. And he knew everything.

The people of Kundagrama, meanwhile, still had his cattle.