આ પૃષ્ઠ હજી ગુજરાતીમાં ઉપલબ્ધ નથી — નીચે અંગ્રેજી આવૃત્તિ છે. અનુવાદ ટૂંક સમયમાં આવે છે.
महावीर जन्म कल्याणक
Mahavir Janma Kalyanak · also Mahavir Jayanti
The birth of Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara.
The birth of Vardhamana, called Mahavira, at Kundagrama in what is now Bihar, in the sixth century BCE. He is the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the present descending cycle, and the only one whose historical existence is not in serious doubt.
A kalyanaka is an auspicious event in a Tirthankara’s life, and there are five: conception, birth, renunciation, omniscience and liberation. This is the second, and it is the one the wider public knows, partly because it falls in spring and partly because it is the one a procession suits. The tradition holds that Indra bore the infant to Mount Meru and bathed him there, and the ceremonial bathing of an image on this day repeats that.
The day is a public holiday across much of India. What it is not is a birthday in the ordinary sense: the point of the observance is not that a great man was born but that the sequence which ends in a teaching had begun, and the reading and processions are arranged around the teaching rather than around the person.
How it is kept
- The image is bathed and anointed — an abhisheka repeating Indra’s bathing of the infant at Meru.
- Processions carry the image through the town, often with a chariot; in many places the day is also given to charitable giving and to feeding.
- Temples read from accounts of Mahavira’s life; some communities keep a partial fast.
Both traditions observe the day on Chaitra Shukla Trayodashi. They differ on his life rather than on the date: the Svetambara account has him marry Yashoda and father a daughter, while the Digambara account holds that he never married. The birthplace itself is contested — Digambara sources identify Kundalpur near Nalanda, Svetambara sources Kshatriyakund in Vaishali district.