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The Twentieth Ford-Maker

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The Twentieth Ford-Maker

Munisuvrata is the twentieth Tirthankara of the present age, his name evoking the "good vows of a sage" (muni-suvrata). His emblem is the tortoise. Jains venerate him as a liberated soul and omniscient teacher among the twenty-four ford-makers of the current avasarpini, and some traditions associate him, like Neminatha, with the Harivamsa or Yadava lineage of Indian legend.

Tradition places him in the sacred antiquity of the age, before the reach of documented history, and holds that he attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). Beyond his emblem, his name and the traditional framework of the five auspicious life-events, the sources preserve little narrative particular to him.

Some Jain tellings place Munisuvrata's era within, or close to, the vast legendary span later covered by the Ramayana, associating him loosely with the same Harivamsa-adjacent world of Ikshvaku and Yadava kings that the tradition also draws on for Neminatha, though Jain and Brahmanical chronologies do not align on this point and the connection is a matter of shared narrative geography rather than any claim that Munisuvrata and the Ramayana's Rama were understood by the tradition to be strict contemporaries in a single fixed timeline.

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