Gotama.
The Jain saints are sometimes designated as Buddha, Kevalin, Siddha,
Tathagata and Arhat (all Buddhist titles) but their special appellation
is Jina or conqueror which is, however, also used by Buddhists[262]. It
was clearly a common notion in India that great teachers appear at
regular intervals and that one might reasonably be expected in the sixth
century B.C. The Jains gave preference or prominence to the titles Jina
or Tirthankara: the Buddhists to Buddha or Tathagata.

2

According to the Jain scriptures all Jinas are born in the warrior
caste, never among Brahmans. The first called Rishabha, who was born an
almost inexpressibly[263] long time ago and lived 8,400,000 years, was
the son of a king of Ayodhya. But as ages elapsed, the lives of his
successors and the intervals which separated them became shorter.
Parsva, the twenty-third Jina, must have some historical basis[264]. We
are told that he lived 250 years before Mahavira, that his followers
still existed in the time of the latter: that he permitted the use of
clothes and taught that four and not five vows were necessary[265]. Both
Jain and Buddhist scriptures support the idea that Mahavira was a
reviver and reformer rather than an originator. The former do not
emphasize the novelty of his revelation and the latter treat Jainism as
a well-known form of error without indicating that it was either new or
attributable to one individual.

Mahavira, or the great hero, is the common designation of the
twenty-fourth Jina but his personal name was Vardhamana. He was a
contemporary of the Buddha but somewhat older and belonged to a
Kshatriya clan, variously called Jnata, Nata, or Naya. His parents lived
in a suburb of Vaisali and were followers of Parsva. When he was in his
thirty-first year they decided to die by voluntary starvation and after
their death he renounced the world and started to wander naked in
western Bengal, enduring some persecution as well as self-inflicted
penances. After thirteen years of this life, he believed that he had
attained enlightenment and appeared as the Jina, the head of a religious
order called Nirganthas (or Niganthas). This word, which means
unfettered or free from bonds, is the name by which the Jains are
generally known in Buddhist literature and it occurs in their own
scriptures, though it gradually fell out of use. Possibly it was the
designation of an order claiming to have been founded by Parsva and
accepted by