The 24 Buddhas and the 24 Tirthankaras

Summary

Suzuko Ohira’s article is a meticulous comparative study of how Buddhists enumerate past Buddhas and how Jains count their twenty‑four Tīrthaṅkaras. The author begins by tracing the idea of a series of enlightened teachers to Vedic precedents such as the seven vipras of the Ṛgveda and the early Buddhist lists of seven Buddhas. She notes that Asoka’s inscriptions and the canonical Āgamas already refer to a sequence of past Buddhas and that later Buddhist texts expand the list to thirty‑two and forty‑five Buddhas, with still more enumerations appearing in works like the Apadāna. Ohira then turns to the Jaina tradition, which fixes the number of Tīrthaṅkaras at twenty‑four across the endless cycles of cosmic time. Drawing on textual sources such as the Samavāyānga and Uttarādhyayana as well as archaeological evidence from Mathurā, Vaibhāragiri and Udayagiri, she examines when images of the Tīrthaṅkaras began to be carved and how the Jains developed a distinct iconography. Jina images in the nude are indistinguishable unless flanked by attendant figures or marked with their individual lanchanas, a feature that appears only in the post‑canonical period. The paper also surveys parallels in the life stories of the twenty‑four Buddhas and twenty‑four Tīrthaṅkaras and discusses how lay followers may have moved between the Pārśvan and Mahāvīra communities. Ohira concludes that despite superficial similarities, the Buddhist lists are flexible and often expand or contract, whereas the Jaina sequence of twenty‑four Tīrthaṅkaras is remarkably stable and probably predates the later Buddhist enumerations. The study situates both traditions within a broader Indian milieu in which the number twenty‑four was symbolically significant and highlights the dynamic exchange of religious ideas in ancient India.