Jain

Jainism has gods and does not regard them as the point, and it denies a creator outright. Both positions are held with unusual firmness, and together they make this one of the most structurally distinctive entries in the atlas.

The universe was not made. It is eternal, uncreated, and operates by its own laws, and the argument against a creator is developed at length in Jain philosophical literature rather than merely assumed. There is therefore no creator to rule, to withdraw, or to be displaced.

The devas exist, they inhabit the heavens, they enjoy long and pleasant lives, and they are inside the cycle of rebirth. Their position is enviable and it is not liberation, and a deva must eventually be reborn like anything else.

What is venerated instead are the Tirthankaras, the ford-makers, twenty-four in the present descending half-cycle, who taught the path and achieved liberation. They are liberated souls, and having been liberated they are not available to intervene. Devotion to them is therefore not petition; it is orientation toward what they achieved.

Time runs in immense cycles, ascending and descending, and each half-cycle produces its own set of twenty-four. The roster is fixed in number and repeated by era, which is a very unusual way to bound a set of venerated figures.

The route in is open to any soul, by practice, and this is what the tradition is for.

Jainism divided over the question of what survived, and the division shapes its textual attestation more directly than in most traditions.

The Svetambara branch holds that a body of canonical scripture, the Agamas, was preserved, transmitted orally for centuries and then committed to writing at councils, the last and most decisive of them at Valabhi. The Digambara branch holds that the original canon was lost, and its authoritative texts, chief among them the Shatkhandagama, are held to preserve what remained through a different line. The two branches therefore do not share a scripture, and a claim sourced to one does not automatically hold for the other.

Alongside the canonical material sits an enormous body of commentary, narrative, philosophical treatise and universal history, and the Kalpa Sutra, which contains the lives of the Tirthankaras and is recited annually, is among the most widely known.

Jain communities also built and maintained manuscript libraries on a scale that has few parallels in South Asia, and those collections preserved not only Jain works but a great deal of other Indian literature that would otherwise have been lost.

The historical anchor is comparatively firm. Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara, is a historical figure contemporary with the Buddha, and his predecessor Parshvanatha is generally accepted as historical as well, which gives the tradition a dated floor that most in this atlas lack.