Rishabhanatha as first Tirthankara

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 sons Bharata and Bahubali.
• Setting: The city of Ayodhya in the third age of the Jain cosmic cycle, when humanity was transitioning from a time of wish-fulfilling trees to a time of need, labor, and law.
• The turn: Rishabhanatha, having ruled as the first king and taught humanity every art of civilization - agriculture, writing, cooking, warfare, craft - renounced his throne and all possessions to seek Kevala Jnana, omniscient knowledge.
• The outcome: After prolonged austerities and a fast that no one in the new age knew how to break, Rishabhanatha attained omniscience beneath a banyan tree and became the first to establish the Jain fourfold order of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen.
• The legacy: Rishabhanatha’s samavasarana - the universal preaching assembly where all beings, human and animal, could hear the teaching - became the model for all subsequent Tirthankaras. His image, seated in meditation with hair falling to his shoulders, remains the foundational icon of Jain worship.

Before Rishabhanatha, people did not need to be taught anything. The kalpavrikshas - wish-fulfilling trees - gave them food when they were hungry, cloth when they were cold, shelter when it rained. No one worked. No one owned. No one fought, because there was nothing to fight over.

Then the trees began to die.

They died slowly, over generations, so that the loss crept rather than struck. A tree that had once yielded sweet fruit now yielded less. A tree that had given cloth gave rags. People stood beneath the bare branches and did not know what to do. They had never needed to know what to do.

The Son of Nabhi

Rishabhanatha was born to King Nabhi and Queen Marudevi in Ayodhya. Marudevi had dreamed of fourteen auspicious things before his birth - a bull among them, which would become his symbol. Nabhi was himself a patriarch of the declining age, a man who sensed that the old order of abundance was ending but did not know how to build what would replace it. His son would.

The boy grew tall. His hair hung uncut to his shoulders. Indra himself, the king of the celestial beings, came to perform the birth rites - the abhisheka, the anointing - because even the devas recognized that this was no ordinary child. The gods poured sacred substances over the infant on Mount Meru, and then they returned him to Ayodhya, to the human world where his work would be.

Rishabhanatha married. He had two wives, Sunanda and Sumangala. He fathered a hundred sons, of whom Bharata was the eldest by Sumangala and Bahubali the eldest by Sunanda. He ruled. But ruling, in those first difficult years when the wish-fulfilling trees were failing, meant something it had never meant before. It meant inventing civilization from scratch.

The First Teacher

He taught them to cook. He taught them to farm - how to plough, how to plant, how to store grain against seasons that the wish-fulfilling trees had made irrelevant. He taught them to make pots. He taught them writing, so that knowledge would not die when the one who held it died. He established the assi - the sword - and the massi - the ink - and the distinction between them: the art of defense and the art of record. He taught seventy-two sciences. He organized people into three orders: warriors, merchants, and laborers. He gave them the framework of society because society had not existed when the trees provided.

He was, in the Jain telling, the first king - Prathama Rajakumar - but also the first teacher. The word they used was Prajapati: lord of creatures, because he was lord not by conquest but by instruction. Everything that human beings would later take for granted - that you could grow food, that you could write a letter, that disputes could be settled by law rather than by force - Rishabhanatha established in the world for the first time.

He did this for years beyond counting. And then he stopped.

The Renunciation

A celestial procession passed through Ayodhya. Rishabhanatha watched it and understood - not gradually, not through argument, but in a single moment of clarity - that possession was bondage. That everything he had built, every system, every art, every family tie, was a thread of karma binding the soul to the cycle. He had taught humanity to live in the world. Now he would teach them that the world was not enough.

He gave his kingdom to Bharata. He gave everything else away. Then he pulled out his hair in five handfuls - the Jain act of keshalonch, the radical severance - and walked out of Ayodhya with nothing. Not clothes. Not sandals. Not a bowl.

Four thousand others followed him into renunciation that day. They did not last. The austerities were too severe, the discipline too absolute. One by one they left, returned to the world, or died. Rishabhanatha continued alone.

The Fast No One Could Break

He fasted. The fast lasted over a year - thirteen months, the texts say, without food. Not because he chose to fast so long, but because no one in the world knew how to offer food to a monk. The practice did not exist yet. He was the first renunciant, and the people he encountered did not understand what he was. They offered him gold, jewels, horses. He refused everything. They offered him cooked meals on plates. He refused, because a Jain monk cannot accept food prepared specifically for him - it must be food already made for someone else and freely shared. No one knew this rule because he had not yet taught it and because there was no precedent.

He walked from city to city, silent, skeletal, and people stared and did not comprehend.

Finally, in the city of Hastinapura, a prince named Shreyansa remembered. Shreyansa had been Rishabhanatha’s companion in a previous life, and some deep recognition stirred. He was holding a pot of sugarcane juice - pressed for his own household, not for the monk - and he offered it. Rishabhanatha accepted. The fast was broken. That moment is remembered in the Jain tradition as Akshaya Tritiya, and to this day Jains break fasts with sugarcane juice on that date.

Under the Banyan Tree

The austerities continued for a thousand years. The number belongs to Jain cosmology, where time scales are not metaphor but structure. Rishabhanatha meditated, endured, shed the accumulated karma of countless lifetimes layer by layer.

He attained Kevala Jnana - complete, unbounded omniscience - while seated beneath a banyan tree. The moment of attainment was not dramatic. There was no storm, no earthquake. The subtle matter of karma that had clung to his soul exhausted itself, and what remained was pure knowledge, infinite in scope, unobstructed.

He established the samavasarana, the great preaching assembly: a structure of concentric rings where humans, gods, and animals gathered to hear the teaching. He spoke, and all beings understood him in their own language. He founded the fourfold order - monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen - giving each its rules, its discipline, its path toward liberation. He was the first to do this. Twenty-three Tirthankaras would follow him across vast stretches of cosmic time, but Rishabhanatha made the ford. Tirthankara means ford-maker, and the ford he made crossed from ignorance to knowledge, from bondage to moksha.

He lived, the texts say, for 8,400,000 years. When he died - when he shed the body at last on Mount Kailash - his mother Marudevi was watching. She saw her son’s soul liberated, and in that instant she too attained Kevala Jnana. She was the first woman to do so.

The world he left behind was the one he had built twice: once with plow and ink, once with silence and refusal.