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Lord Mahavira Dharma, first to the gods and afterwards to men. Mahâvíra gathered around him many disciples, and at his death it is said, no doubt with pardonable exaggeration, that there were fourteen thousand monks, thirty-six thousand nuns, one hundred and fiftynine thousand lay votaries, and many more females, sages, professors and mighty ones. Mahâvîra lived seventy-two years in all, and when his karma was exhausted he died, freed from all pains.
The death of Mahâvîra is clearly stated a number of times. In the town of Papa, near Patna, he quitted the world, cut as under the ties of birth, age and death. He became a Siddha (perfect), a Buddha, a Mukta (liberated), a maker of the end to all misery, free from all pains, and so he died. The night in which he died was lit up by many ascending and descending gods, and there was great confusion and noise.
Krishna Parallels
The story of Mahâvîra has been considered in some detail for its general interest for religious thought, its pattern for the lives of other jinas, and some of its parallels to the Krishna and Buddha stories. Some of the names are practically identical with some in the Buddha stories, and no doubt there was borrowing between these two powerful and contemporary religious movements. On the other hand there were many Indian ascetics and the patterns of their lives often had much in common.
. Among the lists of Jinas there are several names that appear in the Krishna tradition. The twenty-second Jina, the one before Parsva, called Arishtanemi (or Neminatha), is described as the first cousin of Krishna, his father having been brother to Vasudeva, the. father of Krishna. This Jina, like Krishna, is always represented as black, and his emblem is the Vishnuite conch shell. But the Jains claim that he was superior to Krishna, physically and intellectually, and his rejection of luxury and adoption of asceticism show him to have been the opposite of Krishna, at least as depicted in the Puranas. However, he must be mythical, if one accepts the interval of eighty-four thousand years, which is supposed to separate him from the next Jina, Parsva.
The Krishna mythology is particularly influential in Jain ideas of the cosmos. After the Jinas there are the temporal heroes, whose
