Jainism by Vividus

Author(s): Ramnik V Shah
Publisher: Ramnik V Shah Canada

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the daughter of the King of Vaishali. Mahavira was given a second name of Vardhamana by his parents because they saw the prosperity of their family more and more after Mahavira's birth. As a child he had a reflective mind and showed profound wisdom with abnormal intelligence. As he grew up he showed extraordinary physical strength and courage, once by subduing a poisonous snake and later by taming an elephant who had gone wild.
Internationally this was the age of great awakening and intellectual resurgence. There were Pythagoras and lonic philosophers in Greece, Zoroaster in Iran, Moses in Asia-minor and Confucius in China. In India itself there were various other systems of philosophical thought developing which probed the mysteries of mind and matter and attempted to find the meaning of the existence of life, its relation to other life and their final destiny. Whether or not all this affected and influenced Mahavira, and if so how is not known, but soon after entering adulthood and marriage the age of thirty, Mahavira, the husband of Yashoda and the father of daughter Anojja, with the consent of his family, renounced the world and got himself initiated as a Jaina monk. It was some time before this that his parents died and his elder brother Nandivardhana succeeded his father in the position that he had held. Also in not too distant a place the prince Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha was born. Though contemporaries, Buddha was younger than Mahavira by almost thirty years.
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After twelve years of self-mortification, meditation and Yoga in a forest in accordance with the path laid down by Sarvajnas (knowers of everything. the Tirthankaras) of the Jaina traditions at the age of 42, all matters relating to the innermost spirit and the external world were clear to Mahavira and he was ready to preach his sermons of eternal bliss to the weary world. He delivered his first sermon on the mount Vipula near Rajgraha, capital of Magadha. Great as the contributions of other religious systems were, it was Mahavira alone who
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