ऋषभनाथ
Rishabhadeva · also Adinatha; Rishabhanatha in Svetambara usage
The first Tirthankara of this cycle, credited in tradition with teaching agriculture, crafts and social order before renouncing them.
The first Tirthankara of the present cycle, and the one to whom tradition assigns the beginning of ordered life. In the age before him, the account runs, wish-fulfilling trees provided everything and nobody needed to work or to be governed; as that age ended and the trees failed, Rishabhadeva is said to have taught agriculture, fire, pottery, writing, arithmetic and the arts, and to have organised society so that people could survive what was coming.
He then renounced all of it. The renunciation matters as much as the teaching: having given people the means to hold possessions, he demonstrated the giving up of them.
A year of fasting followed, because nobody understood what an ascetic needed — people offered him jewels and elephants, none of it food he could accept. The fast ended when a king named Shreyansa offered sugarcane juice, and that day is remembered as Akshaya Tritiya, still observed.
He is also called Adinatha, the first lord. Digambara and Svetambara accounts agree on the shape of his life more closely than on most.
On the name. Digambara sources generally give Rishabhadeva or Adinatha; Svetambara sources generally give Rishabhanatha. The forms name the same Tirthankara.
This figure is known from tradition; there is no independent historical evidence. That is a statement about the record, not about the tradition.
Written for Jain Times. Corrections are welcome — see sources and licences.