Pulling out his hair
At a Glance
- Central figures: Vardhamana (later known as Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara), his elder brother Nandivardhana, and his mother Trishala and father Siddhartha of the Kshatriya clan.
- Setting: The city of Kundagrama (in the region of Vaishali, northeastern India), and the royal park beyond its walls, in the Jain hagiographic tradition.
- The turn: At the age of thirty, having waited for his parents to die so as not to cause them grief, Vardhamana renounced all possessions and pulled out his hair in five handfuls as the definitive act of severance from worldly life.
- The outcome: Vardhamana walked out of Kundagrama naked and silent, beginning twelve years of ascetic wandering that would end in his attainment of Kevala Jnana - omniscient knowledge.
- The legacy: The act of kesh-lochan - the pulling out of one’s own hair - became the foundational initiation rite for Jain monks and nuns, practiced to this day as the first gesture of renunciation upon entering monastic life.
Vardhamana had been waiting. Not for a sign, not for readiness - he had been ready for years. He had been waiting for permission, and not even that exactly. He had been waiting for his parents to die.
This sounds cold. It was the opposite. Trishala and Siddhartha were old, and they loved their younger son, and Vardhamana knew that if he left while they lived, the leaving would kill them faster than time would. So he stayed in the household at Kundagrama. He ate the food that was set before him. He attended to the duties of a Kshatriya prince. He married, because they wished it. He had a daughter, because these things happen. And he waited, with a patience that looked from the outside like contentment but was not.
The Deaths at Kundagrama
His father Siddhartha died first. Then Trishala. The texts do not linger on the manner of their dying - they were old, they had lived fully, they went. What matters is what their deaths released.
Vardhamana was thirty years old. He went to his elder brother Nandivardhana, who had inherited the household and the obligations that came with it. The conversation between them must have been short, because Jain sources record it almost as a single exchange. Vardhamana asked to leave. Nandivardhana wept. Then Nandivardhana gave permission.
Some accounts say Nandivardhana begged him to stay two more years, and that Vardhamana agreed to this, spending the time giving away his wealth - gold, grain, cloth, cattle - to anyone who came to Kundagrama to receive it. The giving lasted over a year. Vardhamana emptied the treasury methodically, without ceremony. He did not keep a single coin. By the time he was done, there was nothing left to renounce except his own body, and he was not finished with that yet.
The Park Beyond the Walls
On the appointed day, Vardhamana walked to a park outside the city. The Kalpa Sutra names the season and the constellation. It was the tenth day of the dark half of the month of Margashirsha. He had bathed. He wore a single garment - a divine cloth, some texts say, given by Indra himself; others say an ordinary robe. It does not matter. He would not wear it long.
A crowd had gathered - not to celebrate, exactly, but to witness. Renunciation on this scale was a public act in the sramana culture of northeastern India. When a prince walks away from everything, people come to see if he will really do it.
Vardhamana stood in the park. He removed his ornaments - the rings, the gold thread in his hair, the armlets. He set them on the ground. Then he removed the garment, folded it or let it fall, and stood naked before the assembly. The Digambara tradition holds that he never wore clothing again. The Svetambara tradition says he kept the single cloth for thirteen months before it snagged on a thorn bush and he let it go without reaching back. Either way, the direction was the same: toward nothing.
Five Handfuls
Then came the hair.
Vardhamana reached up, gathered a fistful of his own hair, and pulled it out by the roots. Not cut - pulled. He did this five times. Five handfuls. The Jain texts are specific about the number. Each handful came away with a sound the witnesses could hear, or perhaps that is what the tradition wants us to feel - the sound of roots tearing from scalp, repeated five times, deliberate, unhurried.
He did not flinch. Or if he flinched, the texts do not say so, which amounts to the same thing.
This was not symbolic. It was not theater. It was the first act of tapas - austerity applied directly to the body, pain accepted without resistance, attachment severed at the most literal level. Hair is vanity. Hair is identity. Hair is the thing the hand reaches for without thinking. Vardhamana tore it out in handfuls and let it fall on the ground of the park at Kundagrama.
The crowd watched. Nandivardhana, if he was there, watched. The gods - Indra and the celestial beings - are said to have watched from the sky, scattering flowers. Whether the flowers fell or not, the hair certainly did.
The Silence Begins
Vardhamana spoke a single phrase. The Kalpa Sutra records it: Namo Siddhanam - I bow to those who have attained liberation. Then he stopped speaking.
He would not speak again for a very long time. Some sources say the silence lasted the full twelve years of his wandering asceticism. Others say he spoke occasionally, in short necessary utterances, but that the essential orientation was silence. He walked out of the park, out of Kundagrama, and into the countryside of the Ganges plain - naked, bald, owning nothing, saying nothing.
The twelve years that followed were brutal. He was bitten by insects and did not brush them away. He was beaten by villagers who thought him mad or dangerous. He stood motionless in the sun for hours, for days. He fasted - not the moderate fasts of a holy man seeking clarity, but the extreme fasts of Jain practice, weeks without food, months of eating only what fell into his hands without his asking. He did not bathe. He did not seek shelter.
All of this began with the hair.
What Remained on the Ground
The monks and nuns of the Jain tradition still pull out their own hair upon initiation. The practice is called kesh-lochan. It is done by hand - no razor, no blade. Some initiates have their hair pulled out by a teacher. Some do it themselves. It hurts. It is meant to hurt. Not as punishment, but as the first concrete demonstration that the body’s protests can be heard and not obeyed.
Vardhamana walked south and east across the Ganges plain for twelve years. At the end of those years, on the bank of the river Rijupalika, under a sal tree, he sat in deep meditation and did not rise until he had attained Kevala Jnana - complete and perfect knowledge. He was forty-two. He had been walking and starving and keeping silence since he was thirty.
But that is another part of the story. The part that matters here is the park, the crowd, the five handfuls, and the long silence that began when the last of the hair hit the ground.