Teaching cooking and crafts

At a Glance

• Central figures: Rishabhanatha (Adinatha), the first Tirthankara, born as a prince in the royal city of Ayodhya; his twin sons Bharata and Bahubali; and the people of the early world who lived without knowledge of fire, farming, or any organized skill.
• Setting: The earliest age of the current cosmic cycle in Jain tradition, when the wish-fulfilling trees (kalpavrikshas) began to wither and humanity faced starvation and disorder for the first time.
• The turn: Rishabhanatha, still a king and not yet a renunciant, chose to teach humanity seventy-two practical arts and sciences - cooking, pottery, weaving, writing, agriculture, and metalwork among them - establishing civilization itself before turning away from it.
• The outcome: Humanity learned to feed, shelter, clothe, and govern itself. Rishabhanatha organized society into three vocational groups - warriors, traders, and laborers - and instituted kingship under his son Bharata before renouncing all of it.
• The legacy: Rishabhanatha is remembered not only as the first Tirthankara but as the first teacher of human civilization, the originator of all craft and cultivation. Jain tradition honors him as the founder of ordered human life in the present cosmic half-cycle.

The kalpavrikshas were dying. For as long as anyone could remember - and memory in those days stretched back through generations that lived for millions of years - the wish-fulfilling trees had given everything. You stood beneath one and it dropped fruit into your hands. You needed cloth, and leaves broad as blankets unfurled from its branches. No one cooked. No one built. No one had to.

But the trees were thinning. Their fruit came smaller, then not at all. People stood beneath bare branches with their hands out, waiting. They waited a long time. When they stopped waiting, they had nothing else to do, because no one had ever had to do anything.

The Hunger

Rishabhanatha was king in Ayodhya, and he saw what was happening. People wandered. They pulled at roots they could not chew. They crouched in rain with no notion of shelter. A man might find a grain growing wild and eat it raw and sicken. A woman might find clay by the river and not know that fire could harden it into a vessel. Fire itself was a thing they had seen in lightning strikes but never thought to keep.

He did not retreat into his palace. He walked out among the people and began, quite simply, to show them.

The first thing he taught was fire. Not its worship - Jain tradition has no place for that - but its use. He showed them how to strike flint, how to feed a flame with dry grass, how to bank coals so they would last through the night. Once they had fire, he showed them what to do with it.

The Seventy-Two Arts

Jain texts record that Rishabhanatha taught bahattar kala - seventy-two arts and sciences. The number is precise and traditional. Not all seventy-two are listed in every source, but the categories are consistent: agriculture, cooking, pottery, weaving, dyeing, writing, arithmetic, architecture, music, medicine, metallurgy, animal husbandry, and warfare.

He taught them to turn soil with sharpened sticks and later with forged blades. He taught them which grains to plant and when. He showed them how to grind grain between stones, mix it with water, and cook it over fire - the first bread. He taught them to milk cattle, to press oil from seeds, to ferment and preserve.

Pottery came next. He took river clay, shaped it, dried it in the sun, then fired it. The people watched a soft lump become a hard vessel. They could carry water now. They could store grain. They could cook in something other than their hands.

He taught spinning and weaving. Cotton grew wild, and he showed them how to card it, draw it into thread, and cross threads on a simple frame. Cloth replaced leaves. Dyed cloth replaced plain cloth. He taught them to extract color from roots and bark and certain insects, and the people - who had known only the green of the kalpavriksha - suddenly had red, yellow, indigo.

Writing he gave them too. The script, the knowledge that a mark on bark or clay could hold a word and carry it beyond the speaker’s voice. And arithmetic, because once you have grain stored in pots, you need to count the pots.

The Ordering of Society

Craft alone was not enough. People quarreled over land, over water, over the new goods they were learning to make. Rishabhanatha divided them - not by birth, the way later ages would harden the system, but by aptitude and function. Those suited to protection and governance became kshatriyas. Those suited to trade became vaishyas. Those suited to labor and craft became shudras. The Jain telling does not present this as hierarchy so much as practical arrangement. Someone had to guard the granary. Someone had to build it. Someone had to decide how much grain went where.

He placed his son Bharata over the warriors and rulers. His other son Bahubali he gave territories to the south. He organized towns, laid out roads, established markets where goods could be exchanged. He taught them law - not divine law handed down from a god, because in Jain cosmology there is no creator god to hand things down, but practical law: what a person owes to a neighbor, how disputes are settled, what happens to someone who steals from the common store.

Cooking as Civilization

Among all seventy-two arts, cooking holds a particular place in the Rishabhanatha legends. The shift from raw to cooked food marks the boundary between the age of the kalpavrikshas and the age of human effort. Rishabhanatha did not merely show people how to heat grain. He taught combinations - spices with lentils, oil with flour, salt drawn from mineral deposits. He taught preservation: drying, smoking, pickling. Food that could last through seasons meant people could stop wandering and stay.

Settlement followed cooking. Once a family could store food and prepare it reliably, they could build a house and remain in one place. Architecture grew from that need. Rishabhanatha taught them to cut timber, to lay stone, to thatch roofs that would hold against monsoon rain. Towns formed around cooking fires and granaries, not around temples. Temples came later.

The Walk Away

And then he left.

Having built civilization from nothing - having taken a species that stood under dead trees with empty hands and given them fire, bread, cloth, writing, law, cities - Rishabhanatha gave it all to Bharata. He stripped off his royal garments. He pulled out his hair in five handfuls, the way every Jain renunciant after him would do. He walked out of Ayodhya with nothing.

He would not eat for a year. No one understood how to offer food to a renunciant, because no one had ever seen one. People offered him raw materials, or weapons, or bolts of the cloth he himself had taught them to weave. He refused everything. He walked, silent, through the civilization he had made, and the civilization did not know what to make of him.

It was a man named Shreyansa, a king in the city of Hastinapura, who finally understood. He offered Rishabhanatha sugarcane juice - simple, uncooked, poured from a vessel into cupped hands. Rishabhanatha drank. The fast broke. Shreyansa’s act is remembered in Jain tradition as the first proper act of dana - giving to a renunciant - and the date is observed as Akshaya Tritiya.

Rishabhanatha had taught humanity everything it needed to survive in the world. Then he walked out of the world he had made, because survival was not the point.