Anantanatha is the fourth of the five Tirthankaras that tradition places at Ayodhya, and the one whose emblem the two sects most plainly refuse to agree on. Shvetambara images give him a falcon. Digambara lists give a porcupine, or sometimes a bear. Both readings are old, both are still carved, and a page that quietly picks one and hides the other is not telling you the truth about the record.
Anantajit, the Name His Father’s Wars Gave Him
The name is usually explained in modern retellings by a dream: an endless garland, or an endless wheel of jewels, seen by the queen during pregnancy. We went to Hemachandra to check it and found something else.
In the Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, the naming is military. Johnson’s translation reads that “the name Anantajit was given to the Supreme Lord, because infinite armies of his enemies had been conquered by his father while he was in the womb.” Ananta is the endlessness; jit is the conquering. The name records a war King Simhasena won, not a vision his queen saw.
That is worth dwelling on, because it is the same narrative device Hemachandra uses for Shantinatha two Tirthankaras later, where an epidemic subsides during the pregnancy and the boy is named Peace. In both cases the world changes while the soul is in the womb, and the child is named for the change. We could not locate the jewelled-wheel dream in Hemachandra, and we are not going to repeat it here on the strength of web summaries alone. If you can point us to a classical source that carries it, we will add it with the citation.
Beyond the name, Hemachandra’s account is sparse and mostly formulaic. He grew to fifty bows in height, married at his father’s command “with the intention of abandoning worldly life later,” and took the burden of the kingdom after seven and a half lakh years, to please his father. Shvetambara sources have him reign before renouncing; Digambara doctrine denies that any Jina held householder or royal office at all, which is a doctrinal difference rather than a difference about him.
The Kalyanakas of Anantanatha
| Kalyanaka | Tithi | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|
| Chyavana (conception) | Shravana Krishna 7 | Revati |
| Janma (birth) | Vaishakha Krishna 13 | Revati |
| Diksha (renunciation) | Vaishakha Krishna 14 | Revati |
| Kevala Jnana (omniscience) | Vaishakha Krishna 14 | Revati |
| Nirvana (liberation) | Chaitra Shukla 5 | Revati |
Take his birth, Vaishakha Krishna 13. A Gujarati amanta panchang will file that same night under Chaitra vad 13, one month earlier by name, because the months here are purnimanta, the convention Hemachandra works in. His nirvana, Chaitra Shukla 5, needs no such translation: bright-fortnight dates carry the same month name in both systems.
Revati holds all five of his kalyanakas. The first four sharing one nakshatra is not a fact about him, it is a fact about all twenty-four without a single exception; the nirvana is the loose joint, and about ten of the twenty-four move to a different star there. Anantanatha is not one of them. His diksha was taken at Sahasramravana outside Ayodhya, and the kalyanaka calendar sets his dates against the rest of the year.
Diksha and Omniscience on One Tithi
Look again at rows three and four. Vaishakha Krishna 14 carries both his renunciation and his omniscience. This is not a duplicated cell or a copying slip; it is a real feature of the transmitted table, and it happens because the two events fall on the same lunar day of different years. Hemachandra’s account, as summarised by Jainpedia, gives roughly three years of ascetic life between them, with kevala jnana arising under an ashoka tree.
The comparison worth making is Mallinatha, who reached omniscience on the very day she renounced, alone among the twenty-four. Anantanatha’s coincidence is calendrical, hers is chronological. Only one of the two is a miracle; we would rather you knew which.
Hemachandra records that 7,000 munis attained liberation with him. That is the second largest figure in the whole set of twenty-four, behind only Rishabhanatha’s 10,000 and ahead of Vimalanatha’s 6,000, and it is seven times the round thousand that the text gives for most of his neighbours in the sequence.
Falcon in the West, Porcupine in the East
The repo value on this site is the falcon, and it stays. It is the Shvetambara reading, and shyena, the Sanskrit for falcon, is the word behind it.
The Digambara side does not agree, and does not agree with itself either. Wikipedia’s summary of the standard references gives the Digambara emblem as a porcupine or a bear. Jainpedia gives the Digambara emblem flatly as a bear, against the Shvetambara falcon. Generic listicles then flatten all of this into a single “hawk,” which is the reading we see repeated most often online and the one with the least support behind it.
So when you meet a seated Jina on a pedestal with a bird of prey beneath him, you are almost certainly in a Shvetambara setting looking at Anantanatha. If the pedestal carries a bristling quadruped instead, you may be looking at the same Tirthankara through the other tradition’s eyes. We show both and crown neither.
Patala’s Three Faces, and Ankusha’s Goad
The attendant deities are the second identification key, and for Anantanatha, Hemachandra describes them with unusual precision.
Patala, his yaksha, is three-faced, red, riding a makara, with three right hands holding a lotus, a sword and a noose, and three left hands holding an ichneumon, a shield and a rosary. Ankusha, his yakshi, is fair-bodied, rides a lotus, and carries a sword and noose in her right hands, a shield and a goad in her left. The goad, ankusha, is what her name means and what you look for first.
Digambara lists reassign both. Jainpedia gives the Digambara yaksha as Patala or Kinnara, and the yakshi as Anantamati or Vairoti. The mother’s name moves as well: Suyasha in Shvetambara sources, Jayashyama in Digambara ones. His father is Simhasena in both.
Ayodhya’s Fifth Son, and a Kannada Epic
Ayodhya is the birthplace of five Tirthankaras in Jain reckoning, and Anantanatha is the last of them, more than a full cycle of Tirthankaras after Rishabhanatha. Local Jain tradition marks the birthplaces of Sumatinatha, the fifth, and Anantanatha, the fourteenth, at a temple in Mohalla Mondhiana near Rajghat. His nirvana was at Shikharji, where, as with the other nineteen Tirthankaras liberated there, a tonk enshrining his footprints receives pilgrims.
One piece of his afterlife in literature is firmly dated and rarely mentioned: the Anantanatha Purana, a Kannada epic on his life composed by the poet Janna in 1230 CE. He is contemporary, in the Jain universal history, with the Baladeva Suprabha, the Vasudeva Purushottama and the Prati-vasudeva Madhu, which is how the shalaka-purusha scheme locates him in time.
[← Vimalanatha](/tirthankara/vimalanatha/) · [All 24](/tirthankara-astrology/) · [Dharmanatha →](/tirthankara/dharmanatha/)
Revati, and the Two Tirthankaras Who Share It
Revati is the twenty-seventh and last nakshatra, and it is a janma star twice over among the twenty-four: Anantanatha here, and Aranatha, the eighteenth, four Tirthankaras later. Most birth stars in the set belong to one Tirthankara alone. If Revati is yours, you have two.
What that gives you is a devotional handhold, not a forecast. Two sets of kalyanaka days you can keep, two lives you can read, two images you can stand in front of. Nothing about your own life follows from it, and we will not pretend otherwise; see why no honest Tirthankara horoscope can exist for the long version of that argument.
Our free kundali tool computes your janma nakshatra and names the Tirthankaras who share it. The cross-verified table for all twenty-four is at the birth stars of the 24 Tirthankaras.
Sources. Name etymology, the description of Patala and Ankusha, and the figure of 7,000 liberated: Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra in Helen Johnson's translation, Anantanathacaritra, via wisdomlib. Emblem, parentage and attendant deities by sect, diksha at Sahasramravana and the ashoka tree: Jainpedia's entry on Ananta, cross-checked against Wikipedia. Janna's Anantanatha Purana (1230 CE) and the Ayodhya birthplace temple: standard reference summaries, flagged as such. We have deliberately left out the "endless jewelled wheel" dream, which we could not find in Hemachandra. Found it in a classical text? Corrections are seva: tell us and we will publish the citation.