Jainism counts twenty-four Tirthankaras, the ford-makers who teach the path in each descending age, of whom the historical Mahavira was the twenty-fourth and Parshvanatha the twenty-third; the full set structures Jain sacred history and iconography. Chinese tradition divides the solar year into twenty-four jieqi, the solar terms that govern agriculture and were inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, and Confucian moral teaching gathers the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, stories of exemplary devotion to parents. The recurrence of twenty-four as an organising count across such different systems owes something to its divisibility, it splits cleanly into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths and eighths, which is the same practical virtue that made it the number of hours in the day.
The digit four that twenty-four contains carries the same near-homophone weight in Chinese numerology as it does in fourteen, si sounding close to the word for to die, though the digit two is read far more positively, considered auspicious because good things are traditionally held to come in pairs, hao shi cheng shuang; the two associations pull in opposite directions within the same number, which is precisely why Chinese numerology is generally read digit by digit rather than by the whole number's reduced sum.