Rishabhanatha's liberation
At a Glance
- Central figures: Rishabhanatha (also called Adinatha), the first Tirthankara of the current cosmic cycle; his sons Bharata and Bahubali; his daughters Brahmi and Sundari.
- Setting: Ancient Ayodhya and the mountain Ashtapada (Mount Kailash), in the earliest age of Jain cosmic history when human civilization was first being established.
- The turn: After teaching humanity the arts of civilization - agriculture, cooking, writing, warfare, and governance - Rishabhanatha renounced his kingdom and undertook austerities lasting over a thousand years before attaining Kevala Jnana, omniscient knowledge.
- The outcome: Rishabhanatha became the first human being in this time cycle to achieve liberation, ascending from the summit of Ashtapada and ending the cycle of rebirth entirely.
- The legacy: Rishabhanatha established the fourfold Jain community of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen, and his worship remains central to both Digambara and Svetambara traditions as the originator of the Jain path.
Rishabhanatha had one hundred and one sons. He had ruled Ayodhya for a span of time so vast that later tellings would measure it in millions of years, and in that reign he had given human beings nearly everything they lacked. They had not known how to cook. He showed them fire and the pot. They had not known how to write. His daughter Brahmi devised the script; his daughter Sundari devised the numbers. They had not known how to forge metal, plow fields, or build walls. He taught them.
And then, standing in his court at Ayodhya, surrounded by his hundred and one sons and his two daughters and his wives and his ministers and his subjects who owed him everything from the shape of their letters to the taste of cooked grain, he understood that none of it would hold. He had watched a dancer named Nilanjana perform before the court, and in the middle of her performance she had died. Her body was carried out. The music stopped. The court sat in silence.
Rishabhanatha did not return to the throne the next morning.
The Hair Pulled in Five Handfuls
He renounced in the manner that would become canonical. He removed his ornaments. He removed his royal garments. He stood in the great hall of Ayodhya, and before his assembled court he pulled out his hair in five handfuls - the pancha-mushthi-loch - dropping it to the floor. The hair of a king, oiled and perfumed and bound in gold, falling in dark clumps on pale stone.
The god Indra himself was said to have attended the renunciation, catching the hair and carrying it away, pouring sacred water over Rishabhanatha’s bare head. Whether Indra was there or not, the act was absolute. Rishabhanatha walked out of Ayodhya without sandals, without cloth, without a single possession. He did not look back. He did not speak.
He would not eat for six months.
The Long Fast
No one understood what he was doing. This was the difficulty. He was the first. There were no monks, no orders, no precedents. No one in the human world had ever renounced before. When he walked through towns, people came to him and offered gifts - because what else do you offer a former king? They brought him jewels, flowers, bolts of silk. He could accept none of it. They brought him food on golden plates, food mixed with honey, food prepared with elaborate care. He could not accept this either - a Jain ascetic receives only the simplest food, placed directly into cupped hands, and only food that was prepared without intent to feed him.
No one knew the rule. No one offered correctly. For six months and six days Rishabhanatha walked and did not eat. Town after town. Offering after offering, each one wrong.
It was Bahubali’s grandson - or, in some tellings, a king named Shreyamsa, ruling in Hastinapura - who finally understood. He saw Rishabhanatha standing in silence with cupped hands and recognized, without instruction, what was needed. He poured sugarcane juice directly into the Tirthankara’s palms. Simple. Unadorned. Freely given with no ceremony.
Rishabhanatha drank. The fast was broken. Jain tradition holds that this moment is remembered in the festival of Akshaya Tritiya, when the first charity in human history was completed.
A Thousand Years Under the Open Sky
The austerities did not end with the breaking of the fast. They had barely begun. Rishabhanatha practiced standing meditation and sitting meditation through seasons that turned into years, years that turned into decades, decades that mounted past all human reckoning. The texts say he meditated for one thousand years. He stood in the kayotsarga posture - body erect, arms hanging straight, not touching the sides, eyes fixed downward - through rain, through sun, through cold that cracked stone.
Insects crawled on him. He did not move. Dust settled on his shoulders and was washed away by rain and settled again. Villagers who passed him on the road sometimes took him for a termite mound, so still was he, so covered in the debris of the world’s slow turning.
He harmed nothing. He killed nothing. Not the insects on his skin, not the mites in the dust, not the worms beneath his feet. Ahimsa carried to its uttermost limit: a body that the world could use as it pleased.
Kevala Jnana on Ashtapada
On the eleventh day of the dark half of the month of Phalguna, seated beneath a banyan tree, Rishabhanatha’s accumulated karma - that subtle matter which in Jain teaching physically adheres to the soul, weighing it down, binding it to the cycle - burned away. All of it. The knowledge-obscuring karma, the perception-obscuring karma, the deluding karma, the obstructing karma: gone, like ash blown from a clean fire.
What remained was Kevala Jnana. Omniscience. He knew everything simultaneously - every soul in every state of bondage, every atom in every configuration, every past life of every being. The universe lay open and transparent and complete.
He rose and established the samavasarana, the universal preaching hall, where all beings - human, animal, divine - could hear him speak. The hall had three concentric rings. Gods sat in one. Humans in another. Animals in the third. All heard him in their own language. He taught the path: right faith, right knowledge, right conduct. He organized the fourfold community - monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen - the structure that Jain practice would follow for millennia.
The Summit of Ashtapada
Rishabhanatha preached for a vast span of years. When the time came, he ascended the mountain called Ashtapada with ten thousand monks. On the summit, he entered the final meditation. He sat in the lotus posture and did not rise.
His body ceased. His breath ceased. The last filament of karma that bound his soul to matter - the ayushya karma, the life-determining karma - exhausted itself. The soul, freed entirely, rose. In Jain cosmology it rose to Siddha-loka, the realm at the apex of the universe where liberated souls dwell forever, bodiless, knowing, at rest.
The ten thousand monks who had accompanied him also attained liberation on that summit. Ashtapada became the first place on earth where a human being had broken free of the cycle. The mountain stood. The body was gone. Below, in the cities and fields and roads he had taught people to build, the world he had organized continued without him - writing, numbers, plowed earth, cooked food, all of it functioning, all of it impermanent, all of it his.