Who Is Mahaveer?

The Prince Named “Ever-Growing”

Around the sixth century BCE — tradition gives the year 599 BCE — a son was born to King Siddhartha and Queen Trishala of the Jnatrika clan, at Kshatriyakund near Vaishali, in present-day Bihar. While he was in the womb, the kingdom's harvests, treasury and happiness all swelled, so the child was named Vardhamana — “the ever-growing one.” Before his birth, Queen Trishala beheld a sequence of auspicious dreams — a lion, an elephant, the rising sun, a lake of lotuses among them — which the dream-readers said foretold a soul who would become either a universal emperor or a Tirthankara.

He became something greater than an emperor. The scriptures remember the young Vardhamana as fearless — the boy who calmly lifted away a serpent that scattered his playmates — yet inwardly untouched by the pleasures of the palace. He saw what most of us spend a lifetime not seeing: that everything gathered is eventually scattered, everything born must die, and that no kingdom can protect the soul from its own karma.

The Great Renunciation

At the age of thirty, after the passing of his parents and with the blessing of his elder brother, Vardhamana gave away his wealth, left the palace, plucked out his hair in five handfuls beneath an Ashoka tree, and walked into homelessness with nothing — not a bowl, not a garment, not a plan except one: to conquer himself completely.

For twelve and a half years he wandered in silence, mostly fasting, mostly standing in motionless meditation. He endured heat, cold, hunger, insect bites, abuse and assault without a flicker of anger — the texts say he did not so much as wish discomfort upon those who tormented him. Because he moved through every hardship unconquered, the world began to call him Mahaveer — the Great Hero.

Thirty Years of Teaching

For the next thirty years Mahaveer walked across the Gangetic plains, teaching in Ardhamagadhi, the language of the people rather than of the scholars. In his samavasarana — the divine assembly the gods are said to have raised wherever he preached — humans, animals and celestial beings sat in concentric circles, each hearing the teaching in their own tongue. He organised his followers into the fourfold order that still stands: monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, with eleven chief disciples (ganadharas) led by Indrabhuti Gautama.

“As you do not wish pain for yourself, do not inflict it on another. This is the whole of the dharma — the rest is commentary upon it.”

At the age of seventy-two, at Pawapuri, he delivered his final discourse — lasting, tradition says, forty-eight unbroken hours — and on the new-moon night of Kartik attained moksha, complete liberation. The lamps lit that night are remembered every year as Diwali.

Anekantavada — The Many-Sided Truth

Mahaveer's subtlest gift to the world may be anekantavada, the doctrine that reality is many-sided and no single statement can exhaust it. Six blind men, the famous parable goes, touch an elephant: one finds a pillar, one a fan, one a rope, one a wall — each truthful, each incomplete. Wisdom is not choosing the winning description; it is knowing every description is partial.

From it flows syadvada, the discipline of conditioned assertion — the honest “from one point of view…” that disarms dogma before it can become cruelty. In an age of hardened certainties, the Great Hero's deepest non-violence may be this: ahimsa of the intellect.