Rishabhanatha, the Jain first teacher said to have invented cooking and marriage
Jain tradition says that people once lived without work, fed by wish-granting trees. When the trees began to fail, their king Rishabhanatha taught them farming, writing, trade, crafts, swordsmanship and even fire and cooking. He then gave it all up to become the first spiritual teacher of the present age.
Rishabhanatha, also called Adinatha or first Lord, is the first of twenty-four tirthankaras, or ford makers, in the current half of Jain cosmic time. Their teachings are imagined as a ford across the sea of endless rebirth. Because the Jain universe has no beginning or end, the cycle repeats, and in each half a first teacher refounds the faith. Tradition gives him fantastic statistics: a lifespan of 8,400,000 purva and a height of 500 bows, roughly 1,500 metres. Most scholars place him within Jain mythology.
He was born, the stories say, to King Nabhi and Queen Marudevi in Ayodhya, which is why the city is sacred to Jains as well as Hindus. His marriage to Sunanda is said to have set the precedent for the institution. He taught 72 sciences to men and 64 to women, and passed on writing to his daughter Brahmi, after whom the Brahmi script is named, and numbers to her sister Sundari. The scholar Paul Dundas calls him a culture hero who founded knowledge itself.
Renunciation came abruptly. During a celestial dance staged in his court by the god Indra, a dancer named Nilanjana died mid-performance, and the shock of impermanence led him to divide his kingdom among his hundred sons. At initiation tirthankaras pull out five handfuls of hair; one text says Indra stopped him after four because the remaining locks gleamed like emerald on his shoulders.
As the first monk, he found nobody knew how to feed him, and he went without food for 400 days until his great-grandson Shreyansa offered sugarcane juice. Jains celebrate that meal as Akshaya Tritiya, and Śvetāmbara devotees honour it with a 400-day fast, eating on alternate days. He is said to have reached liberation on Mount Ashtapada, and his emblem is the bull.
Source: Rishabhanatha
