Most Tirthankaras are named for a dream, a mark on the body, or a portent read by a sage. Shitalanatha is named for a fever that broke in someone else. Hemachandra gives the reason in a single line, and almost every popular retelling reverses the direction of it.
The Fever That Broke, and the Name It Left
Hemachandra’s Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra explains the name in one sentence: “The King’s body, when it was hot, became cool at Nanda’s touch, while he was in the womb.” Shitala means cool. The heat belonged to King Dridharatha, the hand belonged to Queen Nanda, and the reason it worked was the soul she was carrying.
The direction matters. The version that circulates most widely reverses it and has the father’s touch cooling the mother’s burning fever during pregnancy. That reversal is easy to make and it empties the story out. In Hemachandra the queen is the one who acts, borrowing a power she does not own, on a fever that had defeated the physicians.
Notice also what the passage does not contain. There is no dream here, no interpreting sage, no prophecy. A man was burning, his wife laid a hand on him, and the burning stopped. Of the naming stories Hemachandra supplies across the twenty-four, this is among the plainest, and the plainness is the point.
For the rest, the text is sparing. The child was born at Bhadrilapura to Dridharatha and Nanda, “a gold colored son … marked with a shrivatsa,” on the twelfth day of the black half of Magha, with the moon in Purvashadha.
The Lanchhana That Sits on Every Other Jina Too
Shitalanatha has the most confusing identifying mark in the entire set of twenty-four, and it is worth being precise about why.
Hemachandra fixes it at the birth itself: the infant is “marked with a shrivatsa.” The Shvetambara tradition kept that reading, and it is the reading this page follows. The shrivatsa is a diamond or endless-knot figure, counted among the eight auspicious symbols (ashtamangala) in Shvetambara usage.
Here is the complication. In Shvetambara iconography the shrivatsa is also the mark placed on the chest of every Jina image, all twenty-four of them. Acharya Dinakara explains it as the sign that supreme wisdom issued from a Tirthankara’s chest. So a devotee scanning a temple hall for a shrivatsa will find one on nearly every murti present. The lanchhana is the figure carved on the pedestal, beneath the feet. The one on the chest identifies nobody. With this Tirthankara alone, you have to know which shrivatsa you are reading before the mark tells you anything.
Digambara lists do not use it at all. They commonly give the kalpavriksha, the wishing tree, and some give a svastika or the ashvattha. That is a real sectarian divergence rather than a copying error, and it is why generic web tables of the twenty-four lanchhanas will contradict this page. We follow the primary text we can quote and record the other reading beside it.
Shitalanatha’s Five Kalyanakas
| Kalyanaka | Tithi | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|
| Chyavana (conception) | Vaishakha Krishna 6 | Purvashadha |
| Janma (birth) | Magha Krishna 12 | Purvashadha |
| Diksha (renunciation) | Magha Krishna 12 | Purvashadha |
| Kevala Jnana (omniscience) | Paush Krishna 14 | Purvashadha |
| Nirvana (liberation) | Vaishakha Krishna 2 | Purvashadha |
Every one of his five dates falls in the dark fortnight, which makes the calendar convention unusually consequential here. Take the birth, Magha Krishna 12. Months on this page are purnimanta, the convention Hemachandra uses, and a Gujarati amanta panchang files that same night under Posh vad 12, one month earlier. The same one-month shift applies to all five rows above. Had any of his kalyanakas fallen in the bright fortnight, the month name would have been identical in both systems. None of them does, so all five move.
For every Tirthankara without exception, the first four kalyanakas share one nakshatra. Roughly ten of the twenty-four then move for the nirvana. Shitalanatha does not, and rather than assume it we read the passage: Johnson’s translation of his moksha has the Master and the saints reaching emancipation “on the second day of the black half of Vaishakha, the moon being in Purvashadha.” Five for five, in one star. Which Tirthankaras move, and where, is mapped in full on our kalyanaka calendar.
Renounced on the Tithi He Was Born On
Hemachandra gives the initiation as “the afternoon of the twelfth day of the black half of Magha, the moon being in Purvashadha.” That is the same tithi as his birth, not the day after.
The day after is the near-universal pattern across the twenty-four, and the widely copied Gujarati tables give Magha Krishna 13 accordingly. It would have been easy to smooth the difference away. We do not, because the reading is verbatim in Johnson and because both traditions are internally coherent. Correcting this kind of quiet drift is the reason our calendar research exists.
The surrounding detail is worth having, since it rarely survives into the summaries. One thousand kings took the vow with him. His palanquin was named Chandraprabha, the grove was Sahasramravana, and he kept a two days’ fast before the vow, breaking it the next day on rice pudding given by King Punarvasu at Rishtapura. He then wandered three months as an ordinary ascetic, returned to the same grove, and stood in pratima beneath a wavy-leafed fig tree. Omniscience arose there on Paush Krishna 14.
Three Places Claim to Be Bhadrilapura
Four of his five kalyanakas happened at Bhadrilapura. Only the nirvana was elsewhere, on Mount Sammeta. Where Bhadrilapura actually is has no settled answer.
One identification, the one Jainpedia carries, places it at modern Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, a town also known historically as Bhelsa and Besnagar. A second, argued in recent years by Shvetambara researchers working through manuscript collections, places it at Bhondal village in Chatra district, Jharkhand, near Hunterganj on NH 99 and roughly fifty kilometres from Gaya, where a four-kalyanak temple with an idol of Shitalanatha and four charan padukas now stands. Digambara summaries sometimes give only the bare name Bhadrapur and identify nothing.
What is not in doubt is that the place was being visited as a tirtha long before any of these arguments. Jinaprabhasuri’s fourteenth-century Vividha-tirtha-kalpa, the standard medieval Shvetambara pilgrimage handbook, records Bhadrila as a destination associated with this Jina. A town was there, and Jains went to it. We report the competing identifications and endorse none of them.
What the Digambara Record Changes
The same Tirthankara, two account books
The two traditions disagree on more of Shitalanatha's record than of most. They agree on the yaksha: Brahma, whom Johnson describes as three-eyed and four-faced on a lotus seat, white, with four right arms holding a citron, hammer and noose while the fourth grants fearlessness, and four left arms with an ichneumon, club, goad and rosary. Nearly everything else forks.
| Detail | Shvetambara (Hemachandra) | Digambara lists |
|---|---|---|
| Mother | Nanda | Sunanda |
| Lanchhana | Shrivatsa | Kalpavriksha (some give svastika or ashvattha) |
| Yakshi | Ashoka | Manavi |
| Tree of kevala jnana | Fig | Vilva (bael) |
| Nirvana tithi | Vaishakha Krishna 2 | Ashwayuja Shukla 8 |
The yakshi Ashoka, in Johnson’s description, is the colour of green gram and rides a cloud, with a noose in one right hand and the other granting boons, a fruit in one left hand and a goad in the other. A cloud is a rare vehicle in this iconography, and it suits a Tirthankara whose name means cool.
[← Suvidhinatha](/tirthankara/suvidhinatha/) · [All 24](/tirthankara-astrology/) · [Shreyansanatha →](/tirthankara/shreyansanatha/)
Purvashadha, and Where It Sits in Your Chart
Shitalanatha was born under Purvashadha, in Dhanu. Among the twenty-four janma nakshatras he holds this one alone: no other Tirthankara was born under Purvashadha. If it is your birth star, the kinship is undivided, and it is kinship rather than destiny. What the tradition offers is his kalyanaka days to keep, his story to know, his image to stand before. It does not offer a forecast, and neither do we.
Our free kundali tool computes your janma nakshatra and names the Tirthankaras who share it. The complete cross-verified table for all twenty-four is at the birth stars of the 24 Tirthankaras.
Sources. Birth, initiation, omniscience and moksha passages quoted from Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Book III chapter VIII, in Helen M. Johnson's translation (read via wisdomlib). The name etymology is Hemachandra's, cited at wisdomlib's Shitala entry. Iconography of the shrivatsa as an ashtamangala and as the universal chest mark follows Jainpedia's glossary and the Acharya Dinakara explanation. Sect divergences on lanchhana, mother's name, yakshi, kevala tree and nirvana tithi are drawn from Jainpedia's Śītala article and the Digambara-line summary at Jain Heritage Centres. The Bhadrilapura identifications are reported, not endorsed: Vidisha per Jainpedia, Bhondal in Chatra district per recent Shvetambara research, with Jinaprabhasuri's Vividha-tirtha-kalpa as the medieval attestation that the tirtha existed. The Kalpasutra does not cover this Tirthankara. If we have a detail wrong, correcting it is seva: tell us.