His emblem is not an animal but a diagram, and it is a diagram Jains draw in rice on a temple floor every day for reasons that have nothing to do with him. Follow that one detail and you learn more about how lanchhanas actually work, and how unreliable the popular lists of them are, than any bestiary of the twenty-four will teach you.
The Five Kalyanakas
| Kalyanaka | Tithi | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|
| Chyavana (conception) | Phalguna Shukla 2 | Revati |
| Janma (birth) | Margashirsha Shukla 10 | Revati |
| Diksha (renunciation) | Margashirsha Shukla 11 | Revati |
| Kevala Jnana (omniscience) | Kartika Shukla 12 | Revati |
| Nirvana (liberation) | Margashirsha Shukla 12 | Revati |
Aranatha is one of the straightforward ones to look up, and the reason is in the second column. All five of his kalyanakas are bright-fortnight dates. Only dark-fortnight dates change month-name between the purnimanta reckoning we use, following Hemachandra, and the amanta reckoning of a Gujarati panchang, so his table reads identically in both systems and nothing needs translating. Six of the twenty-four have a clean sheet like this. The other eighteen carry at least one Krishna-paksha date, and that is the whole reason two Jain families can appear to disagree about when a Tirthankara was born while meaning the same night.
There is a second pattern in the column. Three of his five kalyanakas fall in Margashirsha, on three consecutive tithis: birth on the tenth, renunciation on the eleventh, liberation on the twelfth. Those are three different years, decades or millennia apart in the narrative, since a tithi carries no year. But the transmitted table has arranged his beginning, his turning and his end on three successive lunar days of one month, and we would be surprised if that were accidental.
Revati holds all five. The first four sharing one nakshatra is true of every one of the twenty-four; about ten shift for the nirvana, and he does not. The kalyanaka calendar sets his year against the rest.
A Lanchhana That Is Also a Mangala
The nandavarta, also written nandyavarta, is a swastika enlarged into something closer to a labyrinth: four arms, each turned through nine corners. Nandi means joy or prosperity, and the nine turns are read as nine forms of wealth, material and spiritual.
What makes it unusual as an emblem is that it has an independent life. The nandavarta is one of the ashtamangala, the eight auspicious symbols of the Shvetambara tradition, drawn in unbroken rice grains before an image during worship. Jains who have never given a thought to the eighteenth Tirthankara draw his lanchhana regularly, because in that context it is not his lanchhana at all. It is simply an auspicious sign.
The sects then diverge twice over. Digambara lists give Aranatha’s emblem as a fish (matsya), and it is the fish that most generic online tables reproduce. And the nandavarta itself is reassigned: in Digambara reckoning it attaches to Suparshvanatha, the seventh, rather than to Aranatha.
So a nandavarta cut into a pedestal is a Shvetambara statement about the eighteenth Tirthankara, a Digambara statement about the seventh, or not a statement about a Tirthankara at all. The repo value on this site is the nandavarta and it stays; the fish is on the record and we are not hiding it. Neither reading is wrong, and the popular lists that print only one are the ones being careless.
The Third Chakravartin-Jina in a Row
Two of the sixty-three illustrious beings of the Jain universal history can be the same person, and the tradition allows a Tirthankara to have been a Chakravartin, a universal emperor, before renouncing. It happens three times in this half-cycle, and it happens three times consecutively.
Shantinatha the sixteenth is the fifth Chakravartin. Kunthunatha the seventeenth is the sixth. Aranatha the eighteenth is the seventh. Three Tirthankaras in unbroken succession, holding three Chakravartin ranks in unbroken succession, and all three born in the same city. Nowhere else in the list of twenty-four does the universal history double up like this.
One caution about the number. Jainpedia and the standard enumeration of the twelve Chakravartins both make Aranatha the seventh, after Bharata, Sagara, Maghava, Sanatkumara, Shantinatha and Kunthunatha. Wikipedia calls him the eighth. The list itself is stable; the counting in one popular summary is not, and we print the seventh because that is where the enumeration puts him. He is also the thirteenth Kamadeva.
Hastinapura, and Why It Is a Tirtha
Hastinapura in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, is the one town in the Jain sacred map that holds the kalyanakas of three Tirthankaras. Four of the five for Shantinatha, four for Kunthunatha and four for Aranatha fall there; only the liberations belong elsewhere, at Shikharji for all three.
That density is the reason for the pilgrimage. It is not a site with a founding miracle attached; it is a site where twelve kalyanakas happened. Both sects maintain temple complexes there, and the birthplace shrines are among the most visited Jain sites in western Uttar Pradesh.
His nirvana was at Shikharji, where, as for the other nineteen liberated on that ridge, a tonk enshrining his footprints receives pilgrims on the circuit.
The Day That Is Kept in His Name
His diksha tithi, Margashirsha Shukla 11, is Mauna Ekadashi, Maun Agiyaras, a day of silence and fasting observed across the Shvetambara tradition.
The reckoning behind the day is arithmetical rather than narrative. Practice counts 150 kalyanakas on that single tithi, arrived at by taking every kalyanaka falling on it across the five Bharata and five Airavata regions, for the past, present and future sets of twenty-four Tirthankaras each. Popular vrat accounts name the present-cycle contributors, and Aranatha’s renunciation is one of them, alongside three of Mallinatha’s and one attributed to Neminatha.
That last attribution does not match Hemachandra, who puts Neminatha’s omniscience on an Ashvina amavasya, and we flag it on her page rather than tidy it away. Aranatha’s contribution to the day is not in doubt: it is the tithi in his own table.
A Wheel-Spoke Seen in a Dream
The name is explained in the classical manner. Ara is the spoke of a wheel, and his mother is said to have seen a wheel, or a spoke, of jewels in a dream during the pregnancy.
Set that beside Kunthunatha immediately before him, whose name Hemachandra derives from a heap of jewels seen in the same way, and the two look less like separate incidents than like one narrative form applied twice. That is not a reason to disbelieve either. It is a reason to read the naming episodes as a genre rather than as reportage.
His yaksha and yakshi are given on this site as Yaksheta and Dhana. Shvetambara sources also render the pair as Yakshendra and Dharini, and Digambara lists give Khendra and Ajita. Yaksheta appears again as the yaksha of Shreyansanatha, the eleventh, on this site: attendant names recur across the twenty-four, and a name alone will not identify a Jina. His mother is Devi in Shvetambara sources and Mitrasena in Digambara ones; his father is Sudarshana in both.
Beyond that the record is genuinely thin, and we would rather say so than invent. Helen Johnson, introducing the volume of Hemachandra’s Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra in which he appears, wrote that Aranatha and Kunthunatha “are comparatively obscure and not popular with authors,” and that the biographies of them are routine and brief. What is attested is on this page. What is not, is not here.
[← Kunthunatha](/tirthankara/kunthunatha/) · [All 24](/tirthankara-astrology/) · [Mallinatha →](/tirthankara/mallinatha/)
Revati, and the Other Tirthankara Who Holds It
Revati is the twenty-seventh and last nakshatra, at the end of Meena and of the zodiac, and among the twenty-four it belongs to two: Aranatha here, and Anantanatha, the fourteenth, four Tirthankaras earlier. Most birth stars in the set are held by a single Tirthankara. If Revati is yours, you have two.
What that gives you is two sets of kalyanaka days you can keep and two lives you can read, and it gives you nothing whatever about your own. The tradition has never claimed a shared nakshatra predicts anything, and we will not start; the argument in full is at why no honest Tirthankara horoscope can exist.
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. Kalyanaka tithis and nakshatras from Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Johnson's translation; Johnson's remark on the brevity of his biography is from her introduction to the same volume. The nandavarta's nine corners per arm, its place among the Shvetambara ashtamangala, its use in unbroken rice, and its reassignment to Suparshvanatha in the Digambara reckoning: standard references on the eight auspicious symbols. Emblem, colour, parentage and attendant deities by sect, and his rank as seventh Chakravartin: Jainpedia's entry on Ara, cross-checked against the standard enumeration of the twelve Chakravartins, which does not agree with Wikipedia's "eighth". The wheel-spoke dream behind the name: standard reference summaries of the naming episode. The 150-kalyanaka reckoning for Maun Ekadashi and the list of present-cycle contributors: Shvetambara vrat accounts, discussed at more length on our Mallinatha page. We have left out the renunciation-at-the-inscribed-mountain episode that some summaries attach to him, because the classical sources attach that motif to Bharata. Corrections are seva: tell us.