Nobody agrees when Mahavira lived, give or take a century
Jains honour Mahavira as the twenty-fourth and last ford-maker of our cosmic age, a prince who gave everything away at about thirty. Tradition dates his birth to 599 BCE, but historians tie him to his near-contemporary the Buddha, and some push his life a full hundred years later.
Born Vardhamana, he came, according to tradition, from a ruling warrior family of the Nāya tribe, son of King Siddhartha and Queen Trishala of the Licchavi republic, in Kundagrama in what is now Bihar. Where Kundagrama actually stood is unclear; one identification makes it a suburb of ancient Vaishali, another points to the village of Basu Kund, about 60 kilometres north of Patna. Texts say his parents already followed Parshvanatha, the twenty-third ford-maker, whose earlier community Mahavira seems to have revived and reformed.
Accounts say he left home at twenty-eight or thirty and spent twelve and a half years in severe austerity and meditation before reaching kevala jnana, the omniscience Jains regard as complete awakening, after which he preached for about thirty years. His teaching centred on seeing oneself as a pure soul distinct from body, mind and feeling, and on five vows: non-violence, truthfulness, not stealing, chastity and non-attachment.
The chronology is a tangle. Both main Jain sects accept the 599 BCE birth, but the Śvetāmbaras date his death to 527 BCE and the Digambaras to 510 BCE. The traditional era starting in 527 rests on a king list that, as the historian Rapson noted, muddles rulers of different kingdoms who may have reigned at the same time rather than in sequence. Using the twelfth-century scholar Hemachandra's chronology, some historians put his birth in 549 BCE. Because Mahavira and the Buddha both lived under the Magadhan kings Bimbisara and Ajatashatru, scholars who accept a later date for the Buddha move Mahavira too: Dundas suggests he died around 425 BCE, and Long proposes roughly 499 to 427 BCE.
His oldest known images come from Mathura and date between the first century BCE and the second century CE. They usually show him seated or standing in meditation with a lion beneath. His birth is celebrated as Mahavira Janma Kalyanaka in March or April, and Jains mark his liberation at Diwali.
Source: Mahavira
