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 Mahavira.

The meagre accounts of his life relate that he continued to travel for nearly thirty years and had eleven principal disciples.  He apparently influenced much the same region as the Buddha and came in contact with the same personalities, such as kings Bimbisara and Ajatasattu.  He had relations with Makkhali Gosala and his disciples disputed with the Buddhists[266] but it does not appear that he himself ever met Gotama.  He died at the age of seventy-two at Pava near Rajagaha.  Only one of his principal disciples, Sudharman, survived him and a schism broke out immediately after his death.  There had already been one in the fifteenth year of his teaching brought about by his son-in-law.

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We have no information about the differences on which these schisms turned, but Jainism is still split into two sects which, though following in most respects identical doctrines and customs, refuse to intermarry or eat together.  Their sacred literature is not the same and the evidence of inscriptions indicates that they were distinct at the beginning of the Christian era and perhaps much earlier.

The Digambara sect, or those who are clothed in air, maintain that absolute nudity is a necessary condition of saintship:  the other division or Svetambaras, those who are dressed in white, admit that Mahavira went about naked, but hold that the use of clothes does not impede the highest sanctity, and also that such sanctity can be attained by women, which the Digambaras deny.  Nudity as a part of asceticism was practised by several sects in the time of Mahavira[267] but it was also reprobated by others (including all Buddhists) who felt it to be barbarous and unedifying.  It is therefore probable that both Digambaras and Svetambaras existed in the infancy of Jainism, and the latter may represent the older sect reformed or exaggerated by Mahavira.  Thus we are told[268] that “the law taught by Vardhamana forbids clothes