Page:The Heart of Jainism (IA heartofjainism00stevuoft).djvu/85

 Queen Prabhāvatī, ruled. Before her birth her mother longed to wear a garland (malli) woven of the flowers of all seasons, and the gods and goddesses themselves brought the flowers to gratify her desire. Mallinātha's symbol is a water-jar, and she also passed to mokṣa from Sameta Śikhara. Her height was twenty-five bow-shots. The Digambara, who deny that any woman can pass to mokṣa without rebirth as a man, deny of course that Mallinātha could have been a woman. Another point of interest is that the time between the Tīrthaṅkara can now be measured by years, and this nineteenth Tīrthaṅkara was born a thousand crores of years after the eighteenth.

Before the birth of Munisuvrata, his mother, the wife of King Sumitra of Rājagṛiha, kept all the beautiful vows of Jainism (su vrata, good vows) as devoutly as if she had been an ordinary woman and not a queen; hence the child's name. His height was twenty bow-shots; he was born fiftyfour lakhs of years after the last Tīrthaṅkara. His parents, while Kṣatriya or Rajputs, belonged to the Hari dynasty, whereas all the other Tīrthaṅkara, save the twenty-second, belonged to the Ikṣvāku family. His symbol is the tortoise.

The twenty-first Tīrthaṅkara was born in Mathura after an interval of only six lakhs of years. His father. King Vijya, was engaged in an apparently hopeless warfare with his enemies, but the astrologers declared that if his wife, Queen Viprā, showed her face on the city wall (this was before the time of the zenana system) the enemy would bow down (nama) with fear and flee away. This all happened, and the child was named accordingly. Naminātha was fifteen bow-shots in height, his emblem is the blue lotus, and he attained mokṣa from Sameta Śikhara together with a thousand ascetics.

The twenty-second Tīrthaṅkara (like the twentieth) is always represented as black; before his birth his mother, the wife of Samudravijaya, king of Saurīpura, saw a wheel