Teaching writing and social order

At a Glance

Central figures: Rishabhanatha (Adinatha), the first Tirthankara of the current cosmic cycle, and his twin sons Bharata and Bahubali; the people of Ayodhya and the broader human civilization of the third age.
Setting: The city of Ayodhya and the lands surrounding it, during the transition from the age of wish-fulfilling trees (kalpavriksha) to the age when humans must labor and organize to survive; drawn from the Jain account of Rishabhanatha as the first lawgiver and culture-hero.
The turn: When the wish-fulfilling trees begin to wither and people have no knowledge of farming, writing, crafts, or governance, Rishabhanatha - still a king, not yet a renunciant - takes it upon himself to teach humanity every art it will need.
The outcome: Rishabhanatha establishes writing, arithmetic, agriculture, pottery, cooking, and the social order of occupations; he founds the institution of kingship and arranges human society so that people can survive without the miraculous trees.
The legacy: Rishabhanatha’s title Prajapati - Lord of Creatures - and his additional name Adideva, the first among teachers, preserved in Jain tradition as recognition that civilization itself is his invention.

The wish-fulfilling trees were dying. For generations beyond counting they had fed everyone - you stood beneath a kalpavriksha and it gave you what you needed. Clothes, food, shelter, ornament. No one worked. No one had to. But the third age of the current cosmic half-cycle was ending, and the trees were giving less. Their branches thinned. Their leaves curled inward. People stood beneath them with open hands and received nothing, or received less than the day before, and they did not know what to do because they had never needed to know anything.

Rishabhanatha was king in Ayodhya. He was the son of Nabhi and Marudevi, fourteenth in the line of the Kulakaras - the patriarchs who had guided humanity through the declining ages. But the Kulakaras had only needed to settle disputes and keep order among people who were otherwise provided for. Rishabhanatha faced something none of them had faced. He had to teach a species that had never worked how to work.

The First Marks

He began with writing. Not because it was the most urgent need - people were hungry, and hungry people want grain before grammar - but because without writing, nothing else he taught would survive his own lifetime. He could show a thousand people how to plant rice. If none of them could record the method, his grandsons would have to teach it again from nothing.

So Rishabhanatha devised the script. Jain tradition holds that he created the Brahmi script, the ancestor of every writing system in the subcontinent. He drew the characters and taught them first to his daughters, Brahmi and Sundari. Brahmi learned the letters. Sundari learned numbers - arithmetic, calculation, the means by which quantities could be tracked and traded. The two sisters carried these arts outward. Brahmi’s name became the name of the script itself. Sundari’s arithmetic made commerce possible.

Writing came first. Everything else could be written down.

Fire and the Cooking of Grain

Next came agriculture. Rishabhanatha showed people how to clear land, turn soil, plant seed, and wait. The waiting was hard to teach. People who had lived under trees that gave immediately did not understand seasons. They did not understand that a seed buried in dirt would become food only after months of rain and sun and patience. Rishabhanatha walked the fields himself. He showed them the cycle.

Then he taught them fire. The kalpavriksha had given food ready to eat. Raw grain is not ready to eat. Rishabhanatha demonstrated how to husk it, grind it, cook it. He showed them pottery - how to shape clay into vessels, fire them hard, store grain against the months when nothing grew. He taught them to cook with spices and salt. He taught them which plants healed and which ones killed.

Each art required the one before it. You could not cook without fire. You could not store without pottery. You could not plan storage without arithmetic. You could not pass any of it on without writing. Rishabhanatha had seen the whole chain before he taught the first link.

The Arrangement of Occupations

A civilization of workers needs structure. Under the wish-fulfilling trees everyone had been equal because no one did anything. Now people farmed, built, cooked, wove, forged metal, shaped wood. Rishabhanatha divided human occupations into three broad groups - the Kshatriyas who would govern and defend, the Vaishyas who would trade and farm, and the Shudras who would labor in crafts and service. The priests - the contemplatives - would come later, from among those who renounced. Rishabhanatha himself would become the first of them.

But he was not ready to renounce. Not yet. The people were not ready to lose him. He governed Ayodhya and the surrounding territories, establishing law, settling property disputes that had never existed before because property had never existed before. When two men argued over a field boundary, Rishabhanatha adjudicated. When a woman’s pottery was stolen, Rishabhanatha defined theft and its consequences. Each ruling became precedent. The precedents were written down - Brahmi’s letters on palm leaves, Sundari’s numbers tallying the judgments.

He ruled for a period tradition describes as enormously long - millions of years, in the Jain reckoning, because the third age still moved on a scale beyond human comprehension. During this time he had a hundred and one sons. The eldest was Bharata. The youngest was Bahubali. Both were formidable.

Bharata and Bahubali

When Rishabhanatha finally turned toward renunciation - when he pulled out his hair, shed his royal garments, and walked away from Ayodhya to seek Kevala Jnana - he divided his kingdom among his sons. Bharata received Ayodhya and the central territories. Bahubali received a portion to the south. The other ninety-nine sons received their shares.

Bharata wanted more. He wanted it all. He set out with his army and his chakra - the divine discus that rolls ahead of a universal emperor, subduing every kingdom it enters - and conquered the other ninety-eight brothers. They submitted. Most of them renounced the world and followed their father into asceticism.

Bahubali did not submit. He stood his ground. The two brothers faced each other, and rather than send armies to slaughter, they agreed to settle it personally - by wrestling, by eye-combat, by water-combat. Bahubali won every contest. He was larger, stronger, and steadier than Bharata. He could have taken the throne.

He did not take it. Standing there, victorious, he looked at what he had won and saw that it was the same cycle his father had tried to end. Possessing. Defending. Fighting for more. Bahubali renounced on the spot. He stood so still and for so long that vines grew up his legs and anthills formed at his feet. He became the first person after Rishabhanatha to attain liberation through pure, motionless meditation.

What Remained

Bharata ruled the unified kingdom. The land itself came to be called Bharatavarsha after him - the country of Bharata. He was a capable king. He used his father’s systems: the writing, the arithmetic, the social divisions, the legal precedents. The civilization Rishabhanatha had built from nothing held.

Rishabhanatha himself wandered for a thousand years before attaining Kevala Jnana beneath a banyan tree. He preached in the samavasarana - the great universal assembly hall with its concentric rings, where humans, animals, and gods sat together to hear the Tirthankara speak. He taught them what he had always taught: how to live, how to give things up, how to stop.

He had begun by giving humanity everything it needed to survive. He ended by showing them how to need nothing.