Shitalanatha Ji

Shitalanatha is the tenth tirthankara of the present age. His name means the cooling one. He should not be confused with the Hindu goddess Sheetala, whose name carries the same meaning but who belongs to an entirely different tradition. See below.

Shitalnath. No other widely used variant was found.

Lanchana, the emblem: genuinely uncertain, and this platform does not pretend otherwise. Digambara listings give the Kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree, or in some cases the swastika. Shvetambara tradition gives the Srivatsa mark. A specialist iconographic source, examining surviving images, states plainly that the emblem is not clear in the material evidence for this tirthankara. Body colour: golden, in meditative posture. Surrounding sculpture conventionally includes the astapratiharyas, a makara-torana, and naga figures. Yaksha: Brahma, agreed by both traditions, and not to be confused with the Hindu creator deity of that name. Yakshi: Manavi in Digambara tradition, Ashoka in Shvetambara tradition. One source gives the Digambara name as Manasi, a variance recorded rather than resolved.

No distinctive narrative episodes were found for Shitalanatha in any source consulted, beyond the standard arc of royal life, renunciation, omniscience and liberation. That is recorded here as a genuine gap in what is published, not as an editorial omission. Four of his five kalyanakas are placed at Bhaddilpur: conception, birth, initiation and omniscience. His liberation was on Mount Shikharji, where a shrine enshrines his footprints.

Father: Dridharatha. Mother: Sunanda, also given as Nanda. Birthplace: Bhaddilpur, capital of the kingdom of Bhadrikapuri, of the Ikshvaku dynasty. One account reports that the location of Bhaddilpur was lost to Jain memory for around 150 years and was rediscovered in about 1993. That is single-sourced to a research blog and is worth verifying before it is relied on.

Principal places: Mount Shikharji, his liberation shrine; the Calcutta Jain Temple, also called the Badridas Temple, built in 1867, a major Shvetambara centre where he is the presiding image; the Kallu Basadi at Moodbidri; and the Shitalanatha temple at Madhuban, the town below Shikharji.

Both the emblem and the yakshi's name differ by sect, as described above, and the emblem is additionally uncertain in the surviving images themselves. The confusion risk here is real and worth stating plainly. Sheetala, or Sheetala Mata, is a Hindu folk goddess of smallpox and related diseases, worshipped chiefly in north India and regarded as a form of Parvati. Her name also means the cooling one, which is why the two are conflated. They are entirely unrelated, and this platform carries them as separate figures.