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Lord Mahâvîra
and a half days without drinking water, put on a divine robe, and quite alone, nobody else being present, he tore out his hair and leaving the house entered the state of houselessness." 38
There is reason to believe that at first Vardhamana remained in the vicinity of his home as a member of the ascetic order founded by Parsva and with which his parents seem to have been in contact. 39 Evidently finding their rules insufficiently strict, he departed from them for an utterly possessionless wandering. The Kalpasutra records: "The Venerable Asotic Mahâvîra for a year and a month wore clothes; after that time he walked about naked, and accepted the alms in the hollow of his hand. 40
For more than twelve years he sought thus for perfect. salvation. A brief description of his manner of life says: "The Venerable One lived, except in the rainy season, all the eight months of summer and winter, in villages only a single night, in towns only five nights; he was indifferent alike to... straw and jewels, dirt and gold, pleasure and pain, attached neither to this world nor to that beyond, desiring neither life nor death, arrived at the other shore of the Samsara, and he exerted himself for the suppression of the defilement of Karma. 41 Extreme in his asceticism, he slept and ate but little, suffered attacks from animals and men without defending himself, bore pain in silence, and even if wounded never desired medical treatment. 42
In the thirteenth year thus devoted to utterly self-forgetful meditation Vardhamana at last attained perfect understanding. "Outside of the town Jrimbhikagrama," 43 on the northern bank of the river Rijupalika, in the field of the householder Samaga, in a north-eastern direction from an old temple, not far from a sal tree, in a squatting position with joined heels exposing himself to the heat of the sun, with the knees high and the head low, in deep meditation, he reached Nirvana, the complete and full, the unobstucted, unimpeded, infinite and supreme, best knowledge and intuition, called Kevala ('total'). When the Venerable One had become and Arhat and Jina, he was a Kevalin ('possessed of Kevala'), omniscient and comprehending all objects, he knew all conditions of the world, of gods, men, and demons; whence they come, where they go, whether thy are born as men or animals...; he saw and knew all conditions in the whole world of all living beings.
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