What we claim

A reference is only as good as its honesty about its own limits. These are ours, stated once rather than scattered through footnotes — and the counts below are read from the corpus itself, so this page cannot drift from what the site actually holds.

Evidence and tradition are marked apart

Of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, 2 — Parshvanatha and Mahavira — have historical evidence beyond tradition. The other 22 are known from tradition, and their pages say so. That is a statement about the surviving record, not about the tradition, and treating the two as one would make the site less useful to everyone, the devout included.

Where the traditions differ, both accounts appear

2 figures carry a recorded disagreement between the Digambara and Svetambara traditions, the sharpest being whether Malli, the nineteenth Tirthankara, was a woman — which carries the question of whether liberation is available from a female birth. We give both accounts and settle neither. Naming leans Digambara where the spellings differ, but the other tradition's form is always kept and always searchable.

Where there is little recorded, we say so

24 Tirthankaras have substantial accounts here. 6 do not, and their pages say plainly that tradition preserves the name, the emblem and the order but little narrative. Filling those pages with invented paragraphs would be the easiest thing on this site to do and the worst.

Dates are lunar, because the Gregorian ones would be wrong

All 10 observances are given by their position in the lunar year, which is correct every year. Converting one to a civil date needs a panchang for a tradition and a city; the code refuses to compute an approximation, because a festival observed on the wrong day is a real harm rather than a rounding error.

We aggregate news; we do not republish it

Headline, a short extract, the publisher's name and a link — what a feed is published for. Article bodies are never stored. Every source is on a named allowlist, listed at sources and licences, and nothing appears until an editor approves it.

What we deliberately do not hold

• Opening hours, ticket prices and contact details for the 90 temples listed. They change, and a directory that sends someone to a closed door is worse than no directory.
• Photographs we have not licensed. 85 of 90 temples carry a licensed photograph, credited on the page. The rest show a drawing made here, labelled as such — we would rather draw than use an image we cannot account for.
• Anything about you. Reading requires no account. The only personal data held is a newsletter address with its consent record, and erasure means deletion — see privacy.
• Advertising on sacred text. Mantra and recitation pages carry none, ever. It costs revenue on purpose.

What has not been checked