Mah?v?ra
Mahāvīra (Skt., mahat, ‘great’, + vīra, ‘hero’). In Jainism, the honorific title given to Vardhamāna Jnātṛputra, the 24th tīrthaṅkara. The Digambara and Śvetāmbara sects recount two divergent accounts of his life. Both agree that he was born the son of a kṣatriya couple, Siddhārtha and Triśalā, at Kuṇḍagrama just north of modern Patna (Bihar State, India) in 599 BCE. The Śvetāmbara Jains date his life 599–527 BCE (the Digambara hold that he died in 510), but some modern scholarship suggests 549–477 BCE. Śvetāmbara tradition claims that Mahāvīra married a princess Yośodā, who bore him a daughter, Priyadarśanā; but Digambara tradition rejects this. At the age of 30, Mahāvīra renounced family life to become a wandering ascetic in the tradition of Pārśva—for a time in company with Makkhali Gosala. After twelve years of severe fasting to cleanse his body, of silence to improve his speech, and of meditation to clear his mind, he gained omniscience (kevala jñāna) and became a jina. For the next thirty years he travelled throughout NE India, teaching by word and example the path of purification. Mahāvīra died and passed to mokṣa at the age of 73 at Pāvāpurī, near Patna, leaving (tradition claims) 14,000 monks, 36,000 nuns, 159,000 laymen, and 318,000 laywomen to continue his teaching. Jains today look back on Mahāvīra as the greatest of all their teachers.
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Mah?v?ra