Tirthankara
in Jainism, a saviour and spiritual teacher of the dharma
In Jainism, a Tirthaṅkara (IAST: tīrthaṅkara; lit. 'ford-maker') is a saviour and supreme preacher of the dharma (righteous path). The term refers to one who establishes a tirtha, a fordable passage across saṃsāra, the sea of interminable birth and death. According to Jains, tirthaṅkaras are the supreme preachers of dharma, who have conquered saṃsāra on their own and made a path for others to follow. After understanding the true nature of the self or soul, the Tīrthaṅkara attains kevala jnana (omniscience). A Tirthaṅkara provides a bridge for others to follow them from saṃsāra to moksha (liberation).
In Jain cosmology, the wheel of time is divided into two halves, Utsarpiṇī, the ascending time cycle, and Avasarpiṇī, the descending time cycle (said to be current now). In each half of the cycle, exactly 24 tirthaṅkaras are said to appear in this part of the universe. There have been infinitely many tirthaṅkaras in the past. The first tirthaṅkara in the present cycle (Hunda Avsarpinī) was Rishabhanatha, who is credited with formulating and organising humans to live in a society harmoniously. The 24th and last tirthaṅkara of the present half-cycle is traditionally identified as Mahavira (599 BCE–527 BCE).
“Tirthankara” enters the record as in Jainism, a saviour and spiritual teacher of the dharma. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tirthankara, Jainism and saviour can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1077817. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tirthankara” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.