Renunciation of Rishabhanatha

At a Glance

Central figures: Rishabhanatha (also called Adinatha), the first Tirthankara of the current cosmic cycle; his father King Nabhi and mother Queen Marudevi; his one hundred sons, chief among them Bharata and Bahubali; and the court at Ayodhya.
Setting: The city of Ayodhya in ancient Bharata, during the third age of the Jain cosmic cycle, when humanity was transitioning from the age of wish-fulfilling trees to the age of labor and law.
The turn: Rishabhanatha, having taught humanity the arts of civilization - agriculture, writing, cooking, warfare, kingship - renounced his throne, his kingdom, and every possession, pulling out his hair in five handfuls and walking naked into the forest.
The outcome: He wandered for a full year without food, because no human being yet understood how to offer alms to a monk; at last, in the city of Hastinapura, his grandson Shreyamsa offered him sugarcane juice, ending the fast.
The legacy: The breaking of Rishabhanatha’s year-long fast is commemorated by Jains as Akshaya Tritiya, the day of imperishable merit, observed with sugarcane juice and fasting rites.

Rishabhanatha had done everything a man could do for the world. He had watched the wish-fulfilling trees wither - the kalpavrikshas that had once given humanity food, clothing, shelter, and light without anyone lifting a hand - and when they died, he had taught people what to do next. How to plow. How to cook grain over fire. How to shape letters and keep accounts. How to forge weapons and how to govern. He invented seventy-two arts and gave them away freely. He established the first kingdom at Ayodhya. He married, fathered one hundred sons and two daughters, ruled so long that his name became the name for order itself.

Then a procession passed beneath his window. A funeral procession - a minister’s wife, carried on a bier through the streets. The body was wrapped in white. The bearers’ faces were blank with grief. Rishabhanatha watched them pass, and something turned in him. Not revulsion. Not fear. Recognition. He had given humanity everything it needed to survive in the world. Now the world itself seemed small.

The Procession and the Decision

He summoned his sons. Bharata, the eldest, he placed on the throne at Ayodhya. To each of the remaining sons he distributed a province, a city, a territory. His two daughters, Brahmi and Sundari, he entrusted to their brothers’ care - Brahmi, who had mastered script, and Sundari, who had mastered numbers. He divided the kingdom so precisely that nothing was left unclaimed, nothing unattended.

Then he turned to his own body.

He removed his crown. He removed his rings, his arm-bands, his belt of worked gold. He removed his silk upper garment, his silk lower garment. He stood in the great hall of Ayodhya’s palace with nothing on his body and nothing in his hands. His courtiers stared. His sons stared. The ministers shifted on their cushions. No one had ever seen a king do this.

Rishabhanatha reached up and pulled his hair out in five handfuls. The Jain texts are specific about this: five handfuls, pancha-loch, the hair torn from the scalp by the roots. He did not cut it. He pulled it out. Then he walked out of the palace, and he did not turn back.

The Year Without Food

What followed was harder than anything he had done as king.

Rishabhanatha walked south, then east, then north again. He owned nothing, wore nothing, carried nothing. He had taken the vow of complete renunciation - mahavratas, the five great vows: non-violence, truth, non-stealing, celibacy, non-possession. The last of these he had taken to its absolute end. Not a bowl. Not a cloth. Not a thread.

He needed food. A human body, even a Tirthankara’s body, needs food. But here the tradition records something extraordinary: no one knew how to give it to him.

Humanity had never seen a monk. The concept did not exist yet. Rishabhanatha had invented kingship, agriculture, writing, cooking - but he had not invented almsgiving, because there had been no one to give alms to. He was the first. When he approached a village with his hands cupped before him, people did not understand. They offered him elephants. They offered him horses, gold ornaments, dancing girls, bolts of silk. They laid weapons at his feet. They brought platters of cooked food so elaborate that accepting them would have violated a monk’s discipline. They poured out welcome with everything they had, and none of it was right.

Rishabhanatha could not explain. He had taken silence as part of his practice. He simply stood, hands cupped, and when the offering was wrong he walked on.

This lasted a full year. Three hundred and sixty-five days without a single morsel passing his lips. He walked the roads of Bharata, a naked giant among bewildered people, and he grew thin. The texts say he did not waver. He did not break his vow. He did not eat what was wrongly offered, because accepting a wrong gift would have harmed the giver’s understanding of what a monk was. He was building the template. The template had to be exact.

Shreyamsa and the Sugarcane Juice

In the city of Hastinapura, a young prince named Shreyamsa - Rishabhanatha’s own grandson through one of his many sons - had a dream. Or a memory. The texts vary on which. In the dream he saw himself in a former life, offering food to a monk in the correct manner: plain food, placed directly in cupped hands, given without ceremony, without excess, without attachment. When he woke, he understood something his entire generation had failed to grasp.

Rishabhanatha appeared at the edge of Hastinapura that same day. He stood still, hands cupped. Shreyamsa came out carrying a vessel of sugarcane juice - nothing else. No platter, no gold, no flowers. He poured the juice directly into Rishabhanatha’s cupped palms. The first Tirthankara drank.

The texts say the gods rained flowers from the sky. Five auspicious things happened simultaneously: drums sounded in heaven, divine beings scattered petals, the air filled with fragrance, celestial voices spoke the word namo, and a golden light spread across the earth. This event - the first act of proper almsgiving in the current cosmic cycle - is called parana, the breaking of the fast.

Shreyamsa had done what no one else could do. Not because he was cleverer, but because he remembered.

Into the Silence

Rishabhanatha continued his wandering. He practiced austerities for what the texts count as thousands of years - Jain cosmological time does not map onto human scales, and the first Tirthankara’s lifespan is measured in purvas, units so vast they defeat arithmetic. He meditated beneath a banyan tree. He endured cold, heat, insect bites, the hostility of people who did not understand him, and the indifference of people who did not notice him.

At last, on Mount Kailash, seated in the lotus posture, he attained Kevala Jnana - omniscient knowledge, the complete and simultaneous perception of everything that exists, has existed, and will exist. He became the first Jina of this era. The first victor.

He taught. He established the four-fold Sangha - monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen - the structure every Tirthankara after him would replicate. He preached in the samavasarana, the universal assembly hall with its three concentric rings, where humans, gods, and animals could all hear him at once.

When he was finished - when everything that needed saying had been said - he ascended Mount Ashtapada and sat in meditation one final time. He shed the body. The soul rose free of all karma, weightless, and did not return.

The throne at Ayodhya endured. The seventy-two arts endured. The sugarcane juice poured into cupped hands endured longest of all - a small act, rightly done, repeated by Jains on Akshaya Tritiya each year, plain and without excess, exactly as Shreyamsa had done it.