Arihant

An arihant is one who has destroyed the four obscuring karmas and attained omniscience while still embodied, the first of the five beings saluted in the fundamental Jain prayer.

Omniscience in the body

In Jain teaching the soul innate qualities, above all infinite knowledge, are obscured by karma, and the arihant is one who has destroyed the karmas that obscure knowledge, perception, energy and the like, attaining omniscience, kevala jnana, while still living in a body, so the arihant is a living liberated being who knows all things directly. The Tirthankaras, the teachers who establish the Jain path in each age, are arihants who also teach, but not every arihant is a Tirthankara.

First of the five

The arihant is the first of the five supreme beings saluted in the Navkar Mantra, the central Jain prayer, before the fully liberated siddhas, the ascetic leaders, teachers and monks, and the salutation of the arihant first reflects the debt owed to the omniscient one who, still embodied, makes the teaching available. The standing is not conferred but attained through the immense spiritual labour of destroying the obscuring karmas, the culmination of the ascetic path. At the end of the embodied life the arihant sheds the remaining karmas and becomes a siddha, a liberated soul freed from the body altogether, so the arihant is the omniscient being in its final embodied phase, the living summit of Jain attainment.

Jain cosmology divides time into vast descending and ascending half-cycles, and tradition holds that the present descending half-cycle has already passed the point at which a new Tirthankara, and therefore a new teaching arihant of that highest rank, can arise in this part of the universe, the last being Mahavira, traditionally dated to the sixth century BCE though the precision of that date is debated among historians working from the different and not fully reconcilable Jain and other Indian chronological traditions; ordinary arihants who attain omniscience without becoming a Tirthankara are held to remain possible, but the teaching function is considered closed for an extremely long stretch of cosmic time to come.

That doctrine shapes how contemporary Jain communities relate to living spiritual authority: because no living teacher can claim the founding, path-establishing rank of a Tirthankara-arihant in the present age, the most senior living acharyas and ascetics are honoured as authoritative interpreters and exemplars of an already complete teaching rather than as sources of new revelation, a structural humility built into the tradition's own account of where it stands in a much larger cycle of time it has no power to accelerate.