The Life and Times of Mahavira

Vardhamana Mahavira, revered as the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the current cosmic age, is the most historically grounded figure in early Jainism. Svetambara tradition places his birth around 599 BCE at Kundagrama, near Vaishali in modern Bihar, and his death, or final liberation, at Pava around 527 BCE. Some modern scholars, correlating his life with the Buddha, favour slightly later dates, but the traditional chronology remains central to Jain identity. He was born into the Jnatrika clan, a kshatriya lineage, as the son of King Siddhartha and Queen Trishala.

Mahavira lived during a period of extraordinary intellectual upheaval in the eastern Gangetic plain. The old Vedic sacrificial order was being questioned by wandering ascetics known as shramanas, who explored liberation through renunciation rather than ritual. In this milieu arose the Buddha, the fatalist Ajivika teacher Makkhali Gosala, and various materialist and sceptic schools. Mahavira belonged to this ferment and inherited the teachings of Parshvanatha, whose followers were already active.

According to tradition he renounced worldly life at about thirty, after the death of his parents, and practised severe austerities for over twelve years, wandering naked and enduring hardship in the regions of Magadha, Anga and beyond. At around the age of forty-two, meditating on the bank of the Rijupalika river near the village of Jrimbhikagrama, he is said to have attained kevala jnana, omniscient knowledge, becoming a Jina, a spiritual victor.

For the remaining thirty years of his life Mahavira taught across the kingdoms of Magadha, Videha, Kosala and their neighbours. He is associated with the courts of King Bimbisara and King Ajatashatru of Magadha, and with the Licchavi republic of Vaishali, to whose ruling family he was related through his mother. He organised his followers into a fourfold community, the sangha, comprising monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, and appointed eleven chief disciples, the ganadharas, of whom Indrabhuti Gautama and Sudharman were the most prominent.

Mahavira reformulated the ethical core of the shramana path around five great vows: non-violence (ahimsa), truthfulness, non-stealing, celibacy and non-possession. He added celibacy as a distinct fifth vow to the four attributed to Parshvanatha, and he emphasised the discipline of the naked ascetic. His metaphysics taught that every living being possesses an eternal soul (jiva) bound by subtle karmic matter, and that liberation comes through right faith, right knowledge and right conduct. The doctrines of anekantavada, the many-sidedness of reality, and its verbal expression syadvada would be elaborated by later teachers from these foundations.

He is said to have died at Pava, near Rajgir, at the age of seventy-two, entering final nirvana. Jain tradition connects this event with the festival of Diwali, observed as the anniversary of his liberation. His teachings were transmitted orally by the ganadharas and their successors and were only committed to a fixed written canon centuries later.

The historical importance of Mahavira lies not in founding a new religion, for Jains regard him as a reformer within an eternal tradition, but in consolidating and codifying a movement that would survive as one of India's oldest continuous faiths.