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FOREWORD
Rişabha Deva was the Founder of Jainism in the present half-cycle of time. He was a man, but became Immortal and a Tirthamkara (Teaching God), and taught the Path of Perfection to others. Innumerable souls have benefited by his Teaching. There have been twenty-three subsequent Tirthamkaras who re-affirmed His doctrine. He flourished very very far back in the remoteness of hoary antiquity. His life story will be delineated in the following pages. The account is based on the Jaina scripture entitled the. Adi Purāņa. Help has also been taken from an excellent but all too brief abridgment of the Adi Purāņa prepared by Mr. Behari Lal Chaitanya. The date of Rişabha Deva's age is simply un-fixable; all that can be said about His time is that it was anterior to all forms of rational religion; for all mythologies, all allegories, of all lands and peoples, that have a rational interpretation, yield only fragments of the Truth taught by Him, when properly interpreted, and would be quite unintelligible and misleading without the light of His Word. The Jaina chronology places Him at an almost immeasurable antiquity in the past ;
