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Lord Mahâvîra
beneath the blazing sun. He lived on rough foods: rice, pounded jujube, and beans. Taking only these three, the Venerable One sustained himself for eight months. Sometimes he drank nothing for two weeks or even for a month. And sometimes he did not drink for more than two months, or even for six months; day and night he was without desire (for food and water). Even when he did eat, his food was always of a tasteless kind. Sometimes he ate only every sixth day, or every eighth, or every tenth, or every twelfth; free of desires, he remained engrossed in meditation. He meditated free from aversion or desire, attached neither to sounds nor to colors; though still in bondage (chadmastha), he never behaved carelessly during his wanderings.
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Thus:
With supreme knowledge, with supreme intuition, with supreme conduct, with supreme uprightness, with supreme valor, with supreme dexterity, with supreme patience.. with supreme contentment, with supreme insight, on the supreme path to that final liberation which is the fruit of truthfulness, restraint, and good conduct, the Venerable One meditated for twelve years on the nature of the self.62
Jainas point with pride to the fact that Gautama Buddha, unlike his Nigantha counterpart, gave up extreme austerities and followed, the "middle path": they suggest that this model of less than single-minded purpose led the Buddhist order (samgha) to fall eventually into various sorts of laxity from which the Jaina community, based upon the example of Mahâvîra, remained free.
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The Enlightenment
Mahâvîra's actual attainment of kevalajnana took place precisely twelve years, six monts, and fifteen days after he set out upon the mendicant's path.
During the thirteenth year, in Vaisakha, in the second month of summer (May/June), on the tenth day of the waxing moon, when the shadow had turned towards the east... outside the town of Jrmbhikagrama, on the bank
