Naminatha: The 21st Tirthankara

Two problems attach to the twenty-first Tirthankara before you reach anything else. His name belongs to a second, better-known figure of the same city, with whom he is routinely confused. And his city is claimed by two different towns in the same Bihar district, one held by Digambaras and one by Shvetambaras. Neither problem is his, and neither is usually mentioned.

The Five Kalyanakas

Three of the five rows here are dark-fortnight dates, more than most Tirthankaras carry, so the calendar note matters more than usual. Our months follow the purnimanta convention Hemachandra uses. Read on a Gujarati amanta panchang, his birth becomes Ashadh vad 8, his renunciation Jeth vad 9 and his nirvana Chaitra vad 10, each one month earlier by name and not by a single day in fact. The conception on the full moon of Ashvina and the omniscience on Margashirsha Shukla 11 need no adjustment.

One structural oddity is worth pointing out. In most of the twenty-four the diksha tithi sits in the same fortnight as the birth tithi, often the very next day; Neminatha renounces on the lunar day after his birth date, and Anantanatha one day after his. Naminatha’s diksha falls in a different month altogether. Nothing follows from this doctrinally, but it is the kind of detail that gets smoothed over in tidy tables and we would rather leave it visible.

All five of his kalyanakas fall in Ashwini. The first four sharing one nakshatra holds for every Tirthankara without exception; roughly ten then shift stars at the nirvana, and he is not one of them. The kalyanaka calendar sets the whole pattern out.

The Name the Siege Gave Him

Hemachandra explains the name from an event during the pregnancy, and it is a device he uses more than once.

Mithila was besieged. A confederacy of hostile kings moved on the city while Queen Vapra was carrying him, and the siege ended without a battle: the attacking kings bowed to King Vijaya and withdrew. Nam is the Sanskrit root for bending or bowing down. The child was named for what the enemies did.

Set that beside Anantanatha, whose name Hemachandra derives from the endless armies his father defeated during the pregnancy, and beside Shantinatha, named Peace because an epidemic lifted while he was in the womb. Three times the same construction: the world alters while the soul is in the womb, and the child is named for the alteration, not for a dream or an omen. It is a narrative signature, and once you notice it you see how much of the Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra is built out of repeated forms rather than distinct incident.

Beyond the naming, his life follows the standard arc without deviation. He reigned in Mithila, renounced, attained omniscience under a bakula tree, and taught with seventeen ganadharas headed by Suprabha. His liberation was at Shikharji, where a tonk enshrines his footprints as it does for the other nineteen Tirthankaras released there.

Two Namis of Mithila

Open the Uttaradhyayana at lecture 9 and you find a king of Mithila named Nami renouncing his throne, his army and his household, with an uproar in the city as he goes. Indra comes to him disguised as a brahmin and puts ten questions to him. His answers are among the most quoted passages in the Shvetambara canon.

That Nami is not this Naminatha, and the difference is worth holding on to.

Jacobi, annotating the lecture, identifies its Nami as one of the four pratyekabuddhas, the class of beings who reach the highest knowledge by their own effort, without instruction. The definition carries a hard edge: a pratyekabuddha does not proclaim the teaching or found an order, which is precisely what a Tirthankara does. On that classification the two cannot be the same person, whatever they share.

And they share a great deal. Both are kings of Mithila. Both renounce a kingdom. Both are called Nami. Popular retellings collapse them regularly, and you will find the ten questions attributed to the twenty-first Tirthankara on more than one devotional site. We keep them apart because the classical schema keeps them apart, and we flag it because a reader who meets both stories deserves to know that the tradition is not describing one man twice.

Mithila, and the Two Towns That Claim It

Mithila is the birthplace of two Tirthankaras, Mallinatha the nineteenth and Naminatha the twenty-first, which puts it in a small class of Jain sites alongside Ayodhya and Hastinapura.

The complication is that nobody agrees where it is. In the Sitamarhi district of Bihar, the Digambara community identifies the site at Sursand and maintains it through the state tirtha-kshetra committee. The Shvetambara community identifies it at Dumra, in the same district, where a site was registered in 2006 and a temple begun in 2014. Both hold janma kalyanaka observances for both Tirthankaras. Both are functioning pilgrimages.

The oldest description we can point to is no more decisive. Jinaprabhasuri’s fourteenth-century Vividha Tirtha Kalpa, a Shvetambara compendium of some sixty pilgrimage accounts written under the Tughluqs, places Mithila in Tirhut near where the Bana Ganga meets the Gandaki, and names a village called Jagai with temples to Mallinatha and Naminatha standing in it. That is a real datum from seven centuries ago, and it still does not put a pin in a modern map.

This is not a doctrinal quarrel and neither community treats it as scandalous. It is what happens when a city named in texts two thousand years old has to be pinned to a modern revenue map, and the honest position is that the ancient Mithila of the Jain sources has not been archaeologically fixed. If you are planning a pilgrimage, which one you go to will depend on which tradition you belong to, and there is nothing stopping you from going to both.

A Blue Lotus, or an Ashoka Tree

The lanchhana on this site is the blue lotus, nilotpala, and it stays: it is the reading both sects most commonly give, and the one Shvetambara sources give without qualification.

Digambara lists, though, carry an alternative. Alongside the blue lotus they record the ashoka tree as his emblem. That is an unusual kind of variant, because it swaps a flower for a tree rather than one animal for another, and because the ashoka is already loaded elsewhere in Jain iconography as the tree that stands over every Jina in the samavasarana. A pedestal carved with a tree beneath a seated Jina is therefore doing something a pedestal carved with a lotus is not, and the two readings are not simply interchangeable.

We show both. If you meet a Jina with a blue water lily cut into the plinth, at Mithila or at Shikharji or in a Rajasthani temple, this is very probably who it is. If you meet one with a tree, in a Digambara setting, it may be the same Tirthankara under the other tradition’s convention.

His yaksha, Bhrikuti, is common to both. The yakshi splits: Gandhari in Shvetambara sources, Chamundi in Digambara ones. Gandhari is a name that travels, appearing also as the Digambara yakshi of Vasupujya the twelfth, which is a useful reminder that attendant-deity names are reused across the twenty-four and will not by themselves identify a Jina. He is the principal image in temples inside Jaisalmer Fort and at Khajuraho, among others.

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Ashwini, and the Tirthankara Who Shares It

Ashwini is the first nakshatra, at the head of Mesha and of the whole zodiac, and among the twenty-four it belongs to two: Naminatha here, and Mallinatha, the nineteenth, born in the same city two Tirthankaras earlier. Most birth stars in the set are held by one Tirthankara alone. If Ashwini is yours, you have two.

That pairing is a good one to know about, because Mallinatha is the single sharpest disagreement between the sects on the whole list: Shvetambaras hold that the nineteenth Tirthankara was a woman, Digambaras that he was a man. Sharing a birth star with both of them means sharing it with the tradition’s most contested figure, which is a more interesting inheritance than a bland one.

What the kinship gives you is a set of kalyanaka days you can keep and two lives you can read. It gives you nothing about your own future, and we will not pretend otherwise; the long form of that argument 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, and the naming from the enemies who bowed during the pregnancy: Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Johnson's translation. The parallel namings of Anantanatha and Shantinatha are from the same work and are discussed on their own pages. King Nami's renunciation, the ten questions from Indra, and Jacobi's note identifying that Nami as one of the four pratyekabuddhas: Uttaradhyayana lecture 9, Jacobi's translation and apparatus. The bakula tree, seventeen ganadharas under Suprabha, and the golden complexion: standard reference summaries. The Digambara alternative emblem of the ashoka tree and the yakshi split Gandhari / Chamundi: Digambara iconographic lists, cross-checked against Wikipedia. The Sursand and Dumra identifications of Mithila, with the 2006 registration and 2014 temple at the Shvetambara site: published accounts of Mithilapuri Jain Teerth. The Tirhut location, the Bana Ganga and Gandaki confluence and the village of Jagai: Jinaprabhasuri's Vividha Tirtha Kalpa, 14th century. We have not tried to settle which town is ancient Mithila, because the sources do not settle it. Corrections are seva: tell us.