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Lord Mahavira
fordmaker's first fast as a renouncer. Rishabha can thus be viewed as unique among the fordmakers in that he is not just a spiritual teacher but a form of culture hero. .
None of the other fordmakers have as highly developed biographies as the first and last, although the lives of two of them, Malli (for the Shvetambaras a woman) and Parshva, are distinctive and will be described later. Mahâvîra is linked by the Universal History to Rishabha through having been born as his heretical grandson Marici. After a succession of rebirths, including those of a hellbeing and a lion, Mahâvîra completed his penultimate birth in one of the heavens as a god prior to being born as the twentyfourth fordmaker. He was then transporied in embryo form by the general of the army of Indra, the king of the gods, initially to the womb of a brahman woman, a mistake explained by reference to some bad karma which Mahâvîra had acquired in his birth as Marici. He was then taken to the only womb appropriate for a fordmaker, that of a woman of the warrior caste whose name was Trishala, the wife of a king, Siddhartha. 13
After his birth consecration, carried out by Indra on Mount Meru, the axis of the central cosmic continent of Jambudvipa, he was given the name Vardhamana, 'Increasing', because his family's prosperity increased after his birth. Having led a blameless youth during which he married a princess, Yashoda, who bore him a daughter, on his thirtieth birthday the gods performed the initiation ceremony for him and he renounced the world to become a mendicant ascetic. For twelve and a half years, Mahâvîra wandered in the region of the Ganges basin, part of which time he spent with another ascetic called Makkhali Gosala, often enduring physical abuse from men and attacks by animals, fasting and meditating all the while, as a result of which heroic mode of life he received the epithet 'Great Hero, (Mahâvîra) and subsequently, in accordance with the destiny of all fordmakers, he attained enlightenment. He then converted eleven brahmans who were to become the 'leaders of the troop' (ganadhara), the heads of the ascetic order and the basis of the community as a whole. Mahâvîra died aged seventy-two at the town of Pava in what is now the state of Bihar. His body was cremated, with the gods taking his bones to heaven and his ashes being distributed throughout the Ganges region.
