- Lived:
- traditionally c. 872–772 BCE — born a prince of Vārāṇasī (Varanasi); renounced at thirty; died at a hundred on Sammeta Śikhara, the hill in Jharkhand now called Parasnath, after him
- Field:
- religion and ethics — the twenty-third tīrthaṅkara (ford-maker) of Jainism, and teacher of the fourfold restraint
- The Big Idea:
- The ethical minimum, stated in four rules — harm nothing, take nothing not given, tell no lie, own nothing — taught by an order that was already centuries old when Mahāvīra and the Buddha began to preach.
- In their words:
- no sentence of his survives; this is how the canon remembered him — "There was a Jina, Pārśva by name, an Arhat, worshipped by the people, who was thoroughly enlightened and omniscient, a prophet of the Law." (Uttarādhyayana Sūtra 23, tr. Hermann Jacobi)
- If you remember one thing:
- He is the earliest person in this book who probably existed — and we know it not from a monument or an inscription, but from an awkward seam running through scripture, the kind of imperfection no forger would ever have left in.