- Lived:
- the traditions disagree by more than a century — Śvetāmbara reckoning 433–357 BCE, Digambara death c. 365 BCE, other calculations placing his death near 298 BCE; born, all agree, in Puṇḍravardhana in northern Bengal (now in Bangladesh); died, says the southern tradition, on a granite hill in Karnataka
- Field:
- Jain ācārya — head of the monastic order — and by both branches' testimony the last śrutakevalin, the last man who held the entire scriptural canon complete in memory
- The Big Idea:
- A canon that exists only in living memory dies one holder at a time. Bhadrabāhu was the last holder — and, reading a twelve-year famine in advance, he moved twelve thousand monks south and planted Jainism in Karnataka, where it still stands.
- In their words:
- "Since the light of intelligence is gone, let us make an illumination of material matter!" — the kings' cry at Mahāvīra's death, from the Kalpa Sūtra (Hermann Jacobi's 1884 translation), the book tradition places in Bhadrabāhu's hands; the attribution, like much else here, is disputed
- If you remember one thing:
- The man remembered as the last to know everything is the tradition's own explanation of why its scriptures are incomplete — a religion honest enough to build the loss of its own canon into its founding story.