At the very summit of the Jain loka, above the highest of the heavens, lies a region the texts describe with unusual tenderness of detail: Ishatpragbhara, the slightly bent place, shaped like an inverted white umbrella or a waxing crescent, whiter than pearl and moonlight, forty-five hundred thousand yojanas across. This is Siddhashila, the rock of the accomplished, and just at its upper edge, at the boundary of the inhabited universe, the siddhas abide. The physics of their arrival is precise. A soul in Jain thought is naturally buoyant; karma is matter, and its bound particles are the weight that holds souls down in the cycle of rebirth.
At the moment of final liberation the last karmas fall away and the soul rises of itself, straight upward like a flame or a gourd freed of its clay coating, in a single instant, to the top of occupied space, where it stops only because beyond lies the aloka, where the medium of motion does not exist. There it remains, without body, without extension in action, retaining the faint outline of its last embodiment, in unobstructed knowledge and bliss, forever. Nothing rules from Siddhashila and nothing intervenes from it; the siddhas are not gods but precedents. The crescent at the crown is the Jain answer to the question every cosmology must face, where the story ends, and the answer is: at the ceiling of the world, in permanent, silent, accomplished rest.