Of the twenty-four biographies, Padmaprabha’s carries the one sentence that matters most to anyone who takes Jain astronomy seriously. It is also the biography where a widely copied online kalyanaka table quietly breaks, and where Hemachandra records an unusual number instead of a round one. Three good reasons to read past the summary box.
A Craving for a Couch of Lotuses
Hemachandra gives Padmaprabha one of the clearest name-etymologies in the whole set, and it belongs to his mother rather than to him. While Queen Susima carried him, the text records, “the Queen had a pregnancy-whim for a couch of lotuses; and it was instantly gratified by goddesses.” The child was then born, in Johnson’s translation, “red lotus-color, marked by a red lotus.”
Two details are worth holding on to. First, Johnson footnotes that in Hemachandra padma means the red lotus specifically, not lotus in general, so the lanchhana under his feet is a red bloom rather than the white or generic lotus that some modern illustrations use. Second, the pregnancy-whim, the complexion and the lanchhana are one story told three times, which is how these biographies usually work: the sign, the body and the emblem agree.
His parents are given in the repo as Shridhara and Susima, the form the standard reference tables use. Johnson’s translation of Hemachandra names the father simply Dhara, and other lists give Dharana. These are variants of one name, not three different kings, and we flag the variation rather than pretending the sources are uniform.
Before Kaushambi, the soul was Aparajita, king of Susima in the province Vatsa in East Videha. Hemachandra has him hand the kingdom to his son, take mendicancy, keep “the three controls and the five kinds of carefulness,” acquire the body-making karma of a Tirthankara through some of the twenty sthanakas, and become a god in the ninth Graiveyaka heaven. The name of that earlier city, Susima, is also the name of his mother in this life, and the province Vatsa is the same name the historical Kaushambi bore as a capital. The text does not comment on either echo, so neither will we.
Kaushambi on the Yamuna
Four of Padmaprabha’s five kalyanakas belong to one town. Conception, birth, renunciation and omniscience all happened at Kaushambi; only the nirvana moved, to Shikharji, along with twenty of the twenty-four.
Kaushambi is not a legendary location. It is an excavated urban site on the Yamuna in Kaushambi district, Uttar Pradesh, which Jain Heritage Centres places about 64 km from Prayagraj, near Garhwa Kosam village, with the ruins of a walled fort beside the river. Jain Heritage Centres records two temples at the kshetra, a Shvetambara shrine with a padmasana idol of Padmaprabha roughly two feet high and a Digambara temple with its own image of him. The Shvetambara mulnayak there is described as white, which is a mild surprise at the birthplace of the red Tirthankara, and we report it as the source gives it.
The town has a second Jain life. Mahavira is recorded as having visited Kaushambi repeatedly, and a samavasarana of Mahavira is shown at the site. Kaushambi is also where the standard telling places Chandanabala, the enslaved princess of Champa whose bowl of half-cooked urad beans ended Mahavira’s long abhigraha fast and who became the first nun of his sangha. Kaushambi is therefore a place where the sixth Tirthankara’s whole life and one of the twenty-fourth’s most famous episodes overlap.
The Five Kalyanakas of Padmaprabha
| Kalyanaka | Tithi | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|
| Chyavana (conception) | Magha Krishna 6 | Chitra |
| Janma (birth) | Kartika Krishna 12 | Chitra |
| Diksha (renunciation) | Kartika Krishna 13 | Chitra |
| Kevala Jnana (omniscience) | Chaitra Shukla Purnima | Chitra |
| Nirvana (liberation) | Margashirsha Krishna 11 | Chitra |
Take his birth, Kartika Krishna 12. The months on this page are purnimanta, the reckoning Hemachandra uses, so a Gujarati amanta panchang files that same night one month earlier, under Ashvin vad 12. The same shift applies to his conception, his diksha and his nirvana, all Krishna-paksha dates. His kevala jnana, falling on the full moon of Chaitra, needs no adjustment at all: Shukla dates read identically in both systems.
Padmaprabha is one of the Tirthankaras whose star never moves. Every Tirthankara without exception shares a single nakshatra across the first four kalyanakas; roughly ten of them then shift for the nirvana, some by one step (Ajitanatha from Rohini to Mrigashirsha), one of them backwards (Sumatinatha from Magha to Punarvasu), and one famously to Svati on the night Jains now keep as Diwali. Padmaprabha stays in Chitra for all five. The full pattern, and which ten move, is laid out on the kalyanaka calendar.
Around those dates the text records the ordinary furniture of a Tirthankara’s life: initiation from the palanquin Nirvrittikara in the grove Sahasramravana with a thousand kings, a two days’ fast, and the first alms, rice pudding, taken at the house of King Somadeva in the city Brahmasthala.
Vakra and Atichara, the Sharpest Astronomy in the Corpus
Now the sentence. Describing the moment of his birth, Hemachandra writes of “the planets suddenly going to exaltation by retrograde and accelerating motions.”
Read it slowly. It names two genuine technical motions of Indian planetary astronomy: vakra, retrogression, and atichara, accelerated motion. It also names ucca, exaltation. This is not poetic vagueness. It is a writer who knows what planets do and has the vocabulary to say it.
“The planets were in exaltation” is a recurring birth-auspiciousness formula in these texts, appearing at the births of Ajitanatha, Sambhavanatha, Vimalanatha, Shantinatha, Kunthunatha, Mahavira and Padmaprabha. Everywhere else it is a flat phrase. Here alone it is elaborated into mechanism. And that elaboration settles an argument, because it proves the authors were not short of astronomical language. Across all twenty-four biographies they record exactly one celestial datum, the moon’s nakshatra, and they record it consistently. They record no lagna, no planetary sign, no time of day precise enough to cast a chart. They could have. They did not.
Jacobi’s footnote to the parallel Kalpasutra passage sharpens it further: the exaltation phrase is absent from his oldest manuscript, and the very use of ucca shows the insertion postdates roughly 300 CE. So the corpus’s most astronomically literate line is also, on the best textual evidence, one of its latest.
That is the whole reason no honest Tirthankara horoscope can exist, and why the chart circulating for Mahavira is a modern construction wearing an ancient name.
Where Row Six of the Popular Table Goes Wrong
A Gujarati kalyanaka table circulates widely online and is copied without checking. In it, row six, Padmaprabha, repeats the last two cells of row five, Sumatinatha: Chaitra Shukla 11 for kevala jnana and Chaitra Shukla 9 for nirvana. It is a copy-paste slip, the kind that propagates because nobody reads the source.
Hemachandra is unambiguous. Omniscience came to Padmaprabha under a banyan after a two days’ fast “on the day of the full moon of Caitra, when the moon had approached Citra.” His nirvana came at Mt. Sammeta on the eleventh of the black half of Margashirsha, in Chitra. Those are the values in the table above, and they are the values we publish.
Eight Hundred and Three
Most of the Tirthankaras in this stretch are recorded as attaining nirvana with a thousand monks. Padmaprabha is recorded with 803. Suparshvanatha after him has 500, Vasupujya 600, Neminatha 536, Parshvanatha 33. The tradition is not rounding; where it counts, it counts.
His congregation while he taught was enormous by the same texts’ reckoning: 336,000 monks, 420,000 nuns, 276,000 laymen and 505,000 laywomen. Note the direction of the imbalance in both pairs.
His attendant deities in Hemachandra are the yaksha Kusuma, dark-bodied on a deer, holding a fruit and a rosary with a hand in abhaya, and a yakshi the text calls Acyuta, dark-bodied and mounted on a man, with a noose and a bow. The reference tables usually call her Shyama, which is the name this site carries; Digambara sources pair him instead with the yaksha Manovega and the yakshi Manasi. Three naming traditions, one pair of guardians.
If you want to stand in front of him, the most striking place is Padampura (Bada Padampura) near Shivdaspura, about 35 km from Jaipur, where the Digambara atishaya kshetra’s mulnayak is a red stone Padmaprabha with the lotus emblem, unearthed by a farmer digging a house foundation in 1944.
[← Sumatinatha](/tirthankara/sumatinatha/) · [All 24](/tirthankara-astrology/) · [Suparshvanatha →](/tirthankara/suparshvanatha/)
Chitra, Shared With Neminatha and With You
Chitra is one of the small number of janma nakshatras that two Tirthankaras hold in common. Padmaprabha, the sixth, was born under it; so was Neminatha, the twenty-second, Krishna’s cousin, who turned his wedding procession around at the sound of the penned animals. Sixteen Tirthankaras apart, one star.
If Chitra is your janma nakshatra, that is the company the calendar puts you in. It gives you two sets of kalyanaka days to keep, two stories, two images. It gives you nothing else, and we will not pretend otherwise: this is devotional kinship, not a forecast, and no one on this site will tell you that a shared birth star predicts your year.
Our free kundali tool computes your janma nakshatra from your birth details and names the Tirthankaras who share it. The cross-verified list of all twenty-four birth stars, with the sect divergences marked, is at the birth stars of the 24 Tirthankaras.
Sources. Kalyanaka dates, the lotus-couch pregnancy-whim, the exaltation sentence, the banyan, the palanquin and first alms, the congregation figures and the count of 803 are from Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Book III chapter IV (Padmaprabhacaritra), in Helen M. Johnson's translation as published on wisdomlib, parts 1 to 16, including Johnson's footnote on padma as red lotus. The dating of the exaltation formula follows Jacobi's footnote to the corresponding Kalpasutra passage. Kaushambi's location, its two temples and the Mahavira samavasarana are from Jain Heritage Centres; the Chandanabala episode follows the standard sangh retellings. Padampura's red mulnayak and its 1944 discovery are from the temple's published account. Yaksha and yakshi variants are cross-checked against the Digambara lists. Where the sources differ, as on his father's name, both readings stand. Found an error, or a citation we should have used? Write to us and we will correct the page with the source named.