Teaching people agriculture

At a Glance

Central figures: Rishabhanatha (Adinatha), the first Tirthankara of the current cosmic cycle, and his subjects in the early age of humanity.
Setting: The city of Ayodhya and the surrounding lands, in the transitional period between the age of wish-fulfilling trees (kalpavrikshas) and the age of human labor, as told in the Jain tradition of the sixty-three illustrious persons (Trishashti-Shalakapurusha-Charitra).
The turn: The kalpavrikshas - trees that had provided all food, clothing, shelter, and jewels without effort - began to wither and fail, and the people, who had never needed to work, did not know how to feed themselves.
The outcome: Rishabhanatha taught humanity seventy-two sciences and arts, including agriculture, cooking, writing, and governance, founding organized civilization itself.
The legacy: Rishabhanatha is remembered as the originator of human culture - the one who established the assi (swordsmanship), massi (writing), and kassi (agriculture), the three practical arts from which all others descend.

The trees were dying. Not quickly - not the way a fire takes a forest - but steadily, the way a river drops in a dry season. One branch bare, then another. Fruit smaller each month, then no fruit at all. The people stood beneath the kalpavrikshas and waited, because waiting was the only thing they had ever done. These were the wish-fulfilling trees, and for uncounted generations they had given everything: grain without plowing, cloth without weaving, shelter without cutting a single beam. A man held out his hands and the tree filled them. A woman needed ornaments for her daughter’s ceremony and the tree produced gold. No one had ever gone hungry. No one had ever asked how.

Now the branches were bare. The people looked at each other and did not know what to do. They had no word for farming. They had no word for work.

The Son of Nabhi and Marudevi

Rishabhanatha was born to King Nabhi and Queen Marudevi in the city of Ayodhya. The texts say his body was extraordinary - tall beyond any man’s measure, marked from birth with the sign of the bull. He grew in a palace that still had some of the old abundance; some trees in the royal grove still bore. But Rishabha could see what others could not, or would not. The kalpavrikshas in the outer lands were already dead stumps. The ones in the middle territories were failing. Even the palace grove’s yield was thinning.

His father Nabhi was a kulakara, one of the patriarchs of the human race in Jain cosmology - the fourteenth and last of them. The kulakaras had governed loosely, settling disputes, arranging marriages, managing the simple life that the wish-fulfilling trees made possible. But Nabhi was old, and the crisis before him was not a dispute between neighbors. It was the end of an entire way of living.

He placed the responsibility on his son. Rishabha accepted it.

The Seventy-Two Arts

Rishabha did not begin with philosophy. He began with the ground.

He showed people how to break soil. He showed them which grains to plant and when - how to read the monsoon clouds, how to channel water from rivers into furrows. He taught them to thresh, to winnow, to store grain in vessels sealed against moisture and rats. The Jain texts name this kassi - the art of agriculture - and list it as the first of the practical sciences, because without it nothing else could follow.

Then he taught massi - writing. People who had never needed records now needed them. How much grain was stored. How much land belonged to whom. Which field had been planted, which lay fallow. Rishabha gave them symbols, a system of marks that could hold meaning across distance and time. A man in Ayodhya could send instructions to a village three days’ walk south, and the village would understand.

Then assi - the art of defense. Not because Rishabha wanted war, but because he understood what scarcity does. When the trees gave freely, no one fought. When the trees stopped, men began taking from each other. Rishabha taught the sword not to encourage violence but to establish order - to make clear that a community could protect what it had built.

These three - kassi, massi, assi - were the foundation. But the tradition counts seventy-two arts in total. Rishabha taught pottery, so people could cook and store. He taught weaving, so they could clothe themselves now that the trees no longer produced fabric. He taught architecture - how to cut stone, how to raise walls, how to make a roof that held against rain. He taught mathematics, because agriculture without measurement is guesswork. He organized people into varnas - not the rigid caste system of later centuries, but functional divisions: those who taught, those who defended, those who traded, those who farmed. Each group practiced its skill and exchanged with the others.

The texts are specific about this. Rishabha did not delegate. He demonstrated. He put his hands into dirt. He held the stylus. He showed a woman how to spin thread from cotton, then watched while she did it, correcting her grip. He was not a god issuing decrees from a throne. He was a teacher standing in a field.

Fire and Cooking

One detail the tradition preserves: Rishabha taught people to cook. This sounds minor until you consider that the kalpavriksha fruit needed no preparation. It came from the branch ready to eat - warm, nourishing, perfect. Raw grain is not that. A person who has never cooked does not know that wheat must be ground, that dough must be heated, that fire must be controlled rather than feared.

Rishabha showed them fire. He showed them how to keep it, how to contain it in a hearth, how to feed it without letting it consume. He showed them that heat transforms - that the same grain which breaks your teeth when raw becomes soft bread when baked. The people gathered around these first hearths the way they had once gathered under the trees, and for the first time they made something instead of receiving it.

The King Who Would Renounce

Rishabha ruled for a long time. He married. He had a hundred sons, of whom Bharata and Bahubali are the most remembered. He established Ayodhya as a true city - not a gathering place under trees, but a built place with walls and markets and granaries and a system of law.

And then he left.

The same mind that had seen the trees dying and understood what it meant eventually turned inward. Rishabha had given humanity everything it needed to survive without the kalpavrikshas. He had built civilization from bare ground. But he had not answered the question underneath all his teaching: what is the purpose of a life spent laboring, if labor itself is only a response to loss?

He renounced the kingdom. He gave Ayodhya to Bharata. He pulled out his hair in five handfuls - the ancient Jain gesture of total relinquishment - and walked away from the city he had built. He would meditate for a thousand years. He would attain Kevala Jnana - omniscient knowledge - and become the first Tirthankara of this age.

But that came later. Before the silence, before the fasting, before the liberation, there was the field. The broken soil. The first green shoot pushing through, and the people crowding close to see it, not believing that the earth itself could feed them if they asked it properly. Rishabha knelt in the dirt and showed them it could.