Veneration Across the Branches

Rishabhanatha attained kevala jnana, infinite omniscient knowledge, and by tradition final liberation (moksha) on Mount Ashtapada, a peak some accounts identify with Kailash. As the ford-maker who first revealed the Jain dharma in this age, he is deeply revered across both of the tradition's great communities, the Digambara and the Svetambara, and he is among the most frequently depicted of the Tirthankaras in Jain art, recognisable by the bull beneath his image and, often, by locks of hair falling to his shoulders.

His significance is confessional and cosmological rather than historical: he stands at the head of the sequence of teachers by which Jains understand their tradition to have been transmitted from time out of mind. The historical record cannot reach a figure so placed, and the tradition itself does not present him as a person of documented history but as the primordial founder of the path.