Two things make the eleventh Tirthankara worth a careful page. His birthplace is a village a mile and a half from the deer park where the Buddha gave his first sermon. And the chapter Hemachandra devotes to him is one of the longest in the Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, almost none of which is about him.
The Five Kalyanakas
| Kalyanaka | Tithi | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|
| Chyavana (conception) | Jyeshtha Krishna 6 | Shravana |
| Janma (birth) | Phalguna Krishna 12 | Shravana |
| Diksha (renunciation) | Phalguna Krishna 13 | Shravana |
| Kevala Jnana (omniscience) | Magha Krishna Amavasya | Shravana |
| Nirvana (liberation) | Shravana Krishna 3 | Dhanishtha (shifts) |
His is the hardest table on this site to look up, and the reason is that every single one of his five kalyanakas is a dark-fortnight date. Only three of the twenty-four have a table like that. Every row therefore changes its month name when you move between calendars, and none of them changes by a day.
Our months are purnimanta, the reckoning Hemachandra uses. Read the same five dates on a Gujarati amanta panchang and they come out as Vaishakh vad 6, Maha vad 12, Maha vad 13, Posh vad amas and Ashadh vad 3. Every label moves back one month; nothing moves in fact. If you have ever seen his birth given as Magha Krishna 12 in one book and Phalguna Krishna 12 in another and concluded that Jain sources contradict each other, this is the whole of the explanation, and there is no version of his table in which it does not apply.
His first four kalyanakas fall in Shravana, and only the nirvana moves, to Dhanishtha, the next nakshatra along. That is a one-step forward shift, the commonest kind among the ten Tirthankaras whose nirvana star moves at all, and it is much better behaved than Sumatinatha’s, which runs three places backwards. The kalyanaka calendar sets all twenty-four side by side.
A Chapter That Belongs to Somebody Else
Open Hemachandra at the Shreyansanathacaritra and you find a substantial piece of writing. Then you find that most of it narrates the lives of three other people.
The Jain universal history counts sixty-three illustrious beings, and among them are nine triads of Baladeva, Vasudeva and Prativasudeva, each triad contemporary with a particular Tirthankara. The first triad belongs to Shreyansanatha’s era: Achala the Baladeva, Triprishtha the Vasudeva, and Ashvagriva the Prativasudeva. Hemachandra treats them at length inside the eleventh Tirthankara’s chapter, and Johnson’s volume introduction notes that this first set is given far more space than the ones that follow.
The reason that matters is Triprishtha. He and Achala are sons of King Prajapati, a tributary of Ashvagriva; the story is a war story, and it ends the way Vasudeva-Prativasudeva stories always end. And Triprishtha’s soul is a past birth of Mahavira. The lineage of rebirths that begins with Marichi, Rishabhanatha’s grandson, and ends at Kshatriyakundagrama runs through the first Vasudeva, and it does so inside the chapter nominally devoted to Shreyansanatha.
So the eleventh Tirthankara’s biography is long, and the length is not his. This is worth saying plainly rather than dressing his page in borrowed material: what the text gives him directly is a lineage, a set of tithis, an emblem and a place. What it gives around him is the founding war of the Jain universal history.
Two Shreyansas
There is a second figure of this name, and confusing the two is easy.
Prince Shreyansa of Hastinapura was Rishabhanatha’s own great-grandson. When the first Tirthankara had wandered roughly a year without alms, because nobody yet knew what a monk could accept, it was this Shreyansa who remembered a past life, understood what was needed, and offered fresh sugarcane juice. That act is the origin of Akshaya Tritiya in Jain observance, and it is why thousands of Jains break the thirteen-month varshitap fast with cane juice every year at Hastinapur and Palitana. The full account is on Rishabhanatha’s page.
He is not the eleventh Tirthankara. He lived in the first Tirthankara’s own lifetime, was never a Jina, and the day kept in his memory is not a kalyanaka of anybody. The names are close, the stories are both about auspiciousness, and popular retellings run them together. They are two people.
Simhapuri, and the Village Next to Sarnath
Simhapura, Simhapuri, is Singhpur, a village about a kilometre and a half northwest of Sarnath in the Varanasi district.
Four of his five kalyanakas happened there: conception, birth, renunciation and omniscience. Only the liberation belongs elsewhere, at Shikharji, where he is one of the twenty released on that ridge. Four-of-five is the standard pattern for a Tirthankara’s home city, and it is what makes Simhapuri a tirtha; the fifth almost always goes to Shikharji.
The striking thing is the neighbour. Sarnath, Isipatana, the deer park where the Buddha preached his first sermon, is the same ground by a different name and a few minutes’ walk. The Jain temple marking Shreyansanatha’s birthplace stands near the Dhamek Stupa. It was built in 1824, and the ruins beside the newer Digambara structure are those of an older temple raised by Shvetambaras, so both traditions have held the spot.
That two of the three great renunciant traditions of ancient India locate a founding event within a mile of each other is not a coincidence anyone has satisfactorily explained, and we are not going to explain it here. It is worth knowing before you go, because a pilgrim who visits Sarnath for the Buddhist remains and leaves without walking to Singhpur has missed half of what the site is.
The Rhinoceros, and Names That Vary
The lanchhana is a rhinoceros (gandaka), and both sects carve it. Among the twenty-four emblems it is one of the least ambiguous: nobody has ever mistaken a rhinoceros for anything else on a plinth, which is more than can be said for the bird on Sumatinatha’s pedestal or the falcon on Anantanatha’s. If the emblem is legible, the identification is settled.
The attendants are less tidy. This site gives Yaksheta and Manavi; other Shvetambara lists render the yaksha as Ishvara, and Digambara lists give the yakshi as Gauri rather than Manavi. Yaksheta appears again on this site as the yaksha of Aranatha, the eighteenth, which is a reminder that attendant-deity names circulate across the set and will not by themselves tell you which Jina you are looking at.
His parents are Vishnuraja and Vishnu, a matched pair of names that some sources give as Vishnu and Vishnadevi or Vishnashri. Hemachandra puts his height at eighty bows and his lifespan at 8,400,000 years, both figures belonging to the cosmological register of the text rather than to anything measurable, and we report them as the text’s own numbers rather than as history.
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Shravana, and the Tirthankara Who Shares It
Shravana is the twenty-second nakshatra, in Makara, and among the twenty-four it belongs to two: Shreyansanatha here, and Munisuvrata, the twentieth. Most janma stars in the set are held by one Tirthankara alone; if Shravana is yours, you have two sets of kalyanaka days you can keep and two lives you can read.
There is a wrinkle in the pairing worth naming. Munisuvrata keeps Shravana for all five of his kalyanakas, including the nirvana. Shreyansanatha does not; his fifth moves to Dhanishtha. And a third Tirthankara, Chandraprabha, was born under Anuradha but died under Shravana, so the star picks him up at the end. Count nirvana days rather than birth days and the membership of Shravana changes entirely, which is a good illustration of how loosely a nakshatra actually binds anything.
That is the honest size of the kinship: dates and stories, not destiny. Nobody in the classical tradition claimed a shared birth star predicts a life, and the long form of the 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 the Shravana-to-Dhanishtha shift: Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Johnson's translation. That the Shreyansanathacaritra carries the lives of Achala, Triprishtha and Ashvagriva, the first Baladeva, Vasudeva and Prativasudeva, and treats them at greater length than the later triads: Johnson's introduction to the volume containing that chapter. Triprishtha as a past birth of Mahavira: the standard account of Mahavira's chain of rebirths from Marichi onward. Prince Shreyansa of Hastinapura, the first alms and Akshaya Tritiya: Hemachandra's Rishabhanatha chapter, discussed at length on that page; he is a separate person and we flag the confusion because it is common. Singhpur's location relative to Sarnath, the four kalyanakas at Simhapuri, the 1824 temple near the Dhamek Stupa and the older Shvetambara ruins beside it: published accounts of Sarnath Jain Tirth. Emblem, complexion, height, lifespan and parentage, and the variant attendant names Ishvara and Gauri: standard reference works, cross-checked. Where our repo values differ from a generic online list, the repo values stand and the variants are shown beside them. Corrections are seva: tell us.