Chandraprabha is the Tirthankara you can name across a crowded temple hall without walking closer. Everything about him is the moon: a moon-white body, a crescent under his feet, a birthplace named for the moon, and a nirvana that falls in the month Shravana with the moon standing in the nakshatra Shravana. He is also a good test of how carefully a source is reading, because several of the stories told about him are not in the text they are attributed to.
King Padma of Ratnasanchaya
The life before this one is recorded with unusual specificity. The soul was Padma, king of the city Ratnasanchaya in the province Mangalavati, in East Videha, on the continent Dhatakikhanda. Hemachandra says he “attained disgust with living in worldly existence,” gave up the throne, and took the vow of mendicancy under the guru Yugandhara. Through that ascetic life he acquired the body-making karma of a Tirthankara, which the text treats as extraordinarily hard to bind, and at death “went to the palace Vaijayanta, which was the first fruit of the tree of the vow.”
Vaijayanta is one of the five anuttara vimanas, the highest heavens in Jain cosmology, and a soul reborn there has at most a very short remaining career in samsara. The eighth Tirthankara arrives on earth already one life from the end.
Chandranana, Chandrapuri, Chandravati: One Site, Three Names
This site gives his birthplace as Chandranana, which is the name Hemachandra uses. You will meet the same town as Chandrapuri and as Chandravati, and all three refer to one place: a village on the Ganga about 23 km from Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh.
The kalyanaka-bhumi there is not a modern invention. It carries a Digambara temple and a Shvetambara temple side by side, the second overlooking the river, and it holds three of his five kalyanakas. Two dated facts anchor the site. An inscription of 1091 CE records the temple receiving grants from King Chandradeva of the Gahadavala dynasty, which puts an endowed Jain establishment there in the eleventh century. And an excavation in 1877 turned up temple remains dated to the ninth and tenth centuries, now held in the State Museum, Lucknow. Whatever the tradition says about the age of the tirtha, the archaeology independently reaches back a thousand years.
Chandrapuri is frequently folded into “Varanasi, birthplace of four Tirthankaras.” It is worth keeping the geography honest: Varanasi proper is the birthplace of Suparshvanatha and Parshvanatha. Chandraprabha’s town and Shreyansanatha’s Simhapuri are separate places on the Ganga near the city, each with its own shrine.
What Hemachandra Does Not Say About His Name
A story circulates that Queen Lakshmana, while pregnant, was seized by a craving to drink the moon, and that the child was named for it. It is a good story. We went looking for it in the primary text and did not find it.
Hemachandra gives dohadas, pregnancy-whims, freely elsewhere. He records that Padmaprabha’s mother craved a couch of lotuses and that it was gratified by goddesses. He records that Suvidhinatha’s mother had a whim for flowers. For Chandraprabha’s mother he records no whim at all. What the text does give is the conception “when the moon was in conjunction with Anuradha, on the fifth day of the black half of Chaitra,” and a child born on Paush Krishna 12 “marked with a moon, the color of the moon.”
The explanation the reference works actually support is the plainer one: King Mahasena named the child Chandraprabha, “moonlight,” because his complexion was as white as the moon. The moon-drinking dohada may well exist in some later retelling or regional commentary we have not reached. Until we can name that source, it stays off this page. If you know where it is written, tell us and it goes up with the citation attached.
Five Kalyanakas in Anuradha
| Kalyanaka | Tithi | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|
| Chyavana (conception) | Chaitra Krishna 5 | Anuradha |
| Janma (birth) | Paush Krishna 12 | Anuradha |
| Diksha (renunciation) | Paush Krishna 13 | Anuradha |
| Kevala Jnana (omniscience) | Phalguna Krishna 7 | Anuradha |
| Nirvana (liberation) | Shravana Krishna 7 | Shravana (shifts) |
All five of these are Krishna-paksha dates, which makes Chandraprabha the cleanest illustration of the calendar problem on the whole site. The months here are purnimanta, Hemachandra’s reckoning. Under the Gujarati amanta system, every one of his five dates is filed under the previous month’s name: his birth on Paush Krishna 12 becomes Magsar vad 12, his nirvana on Shravana Krishna 7 becomes Ashadh vad 7. Not one of his kalyanakas escapes the shift, because he has no Shukla-paksha date; Shukla dates are where the two systems agree, and he has none. Same nights, different labels, and a table that mixes the two conventions will place him a month wrong five times out of five.
The nakshatra column follows the invariable rule for the first four entries. Conception, birth, renunciation and omniscience all sit in Anuradha, as the four always sit in one star for every Tirthankara. Then the nirvana moves to Shravana, and the move is neither adjacent nor small: Anuradha is the seventeenth nakshatra, Shravana the twenty-second. About ten of the twenty-four make some shift at the nirvana; four of those move only one step, and Chandraprabha is not among the gentle ones. All of it is mapped at the kalyanaka calendar.
There is a coincidence in that last row worth pausing on. Johnson translates the month as Nabha, his rendering of Nabhas, which is Shravana; the nakshatra is also Shravana. Chandraprabha’s liberation falls in the month Shravana with the moon in the nakshatra Shravana, the star from which the month takes its name. The text does not remark on it. It is simply there in the record.
The surrounding detail is dense and specific: renunciation on the afternoon of Paush Krishna 13, from the palanquin Manorama, in the grove Sahasramravana, with a thousand kings; the first alms, rice pudding, the following day at the house of King Somadatta in the city Padmakhandapura; omniscience after a two days’ fast beneath a punnaga tree, the destructive karma vanishing, in Hemachandra’s image, “like snow at the end of winter.” He reached moksha at Mt. Sammeta with a thousand munis.
White Body, Crescent Moon: The Easiest Jina to Name in a Temple
Jain images are deliberately near-identical. That is doctrine, not a limitation of the sculptors: a liberated soul has no distinguishing marks left to carve. Identification therefore runs on two channels only, the lanchhana beneath the feet and, in painted or coloured images, the body colour.
Chandraprabha wins on both. Only two of the twenty-four are white, he and Suvidhinatha, the ninth, and the two are separated instantly by their emblems: a crescent moon for Chandraprabha, a crocodile for Suvidhinatha. Nobody confuses those two shapes. Compare the difficulty of telling a swastika from a nandavarta, or of counting the hoods on a damaged serpent canopy, and you will see how unusually easy he is.
Old and large images of him survive across the subcontinent. A rock-cut Chandraprabha roughly three metres high, dated to the fifth or sixth century, stands at Sonagiri in Datia district, Madhya Pradesh, about 60 km from Gwalior, on a hill carrying more than a hundred temples. The Vijayamangalam Jain temple in Tamil Nadu, dedicated to him, is dated to about 678 CE. The Saavira Kambada Basadi at Moodabidri in Karnataka, the thousand-pillar temple, was built in 1430 CE and is his as well. He is not a minor figure in stone.
Vijaya and Bhrikuti, or Shyama and Jvalamalini
His attendant deities are one of the sharper sect divergences in this part of the list, and the site’s fact box carries the Shvetambara pair.
| Shvetambara (Hemachandra) | Digambara | |
|---|---|---|
| Yaksha | Vijaya | Shyama |
| Yakshi | Bhrikuti | Jvalamalini |
Hemachandra describes them in enough detail to sculpt from. Vijaya is green, mounted on a hamsa, holding a chakra in his right hand and a hammer in his left. Bhrikuti is yellow, mounted on a marala, with a sword and a hammer in her right hands and a shield and an axe in her left. Four of those six attributes are weapons, which is worth noticing in the retinue of a Tirthankara whose whole iconography is cool moonlight.
The Digambara substitution is not a spelling variant of the kind we saw with Suparshvanatha’s father. Jvalamalini is a different goddess with a different name, a different iconography and, in the Digambara south, a following of her own. Neither list is a corruption of the other. Both are old, both are internally consistent, and we show both without ranking them.
[← Suparshvanatha](/tirthankara/suparshvanatha/) · [All 24](/tirthankara-astrology/) · [Suvidhinatha →](/tirthankara/suvidhinatha/)
Anuradha, and Your Own Janma Nakshatra
Anuradha belongs to Chandraprabha alone. Among the janma nakshatras of the twenty-four it is unshared: no other Tirthankara was born under it. A handful of stars are held in common, Revati by two, Ashwini by two, Shravana by two, Vishakha by two, Chitra by two. Anuradha is not one of them.
If you were born under Anuradha, the tradition hands you exactly one figure and no committee. His kalyanaka days are the ones your calendar keeps; his is the image you stand in front of. That is the offer, and it is the whole offer. It is kinship, not a forecast. Nothing here reads your birth star as a claim about your health, your marriage or your year, and anyone who tells you a Tirthankara’s nakshatra predicts yours has stopped doing Jainism and started selling something.
The free kundali tool will compute your janma nakshatra from your birth date, time and place and tell you plainly which Tirthankaras, if any, share it. The complete list, checked against the primary texts, sits at the birth stars of the 24 Tirthankaras.
Sources. The life as King Padma of Ratnasanchaya, the guru Yugandhara, the Vaijayanta palace, the conception and birth dates and nakshatras, the palanquin Manorama, the grove, the first alms at Padmakhandapura, the punnaga tree, the descriptions of Vijaya and Bhrikuti, the thousand munis and the nirvana in Nabha under Shravana are from Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Book III chapter VI (Candraprabhacaritra), in Helen M. Johnson's translation on wisdomlib, parts 1 to 12; Nabha and Maitreya are Johnson's synonyms for Shravana and Anuradha respectively. The 1091 CE Gahadavala inscription, the 1877 excavation and the Lucknow State Museum holdings are from the published account of the Chandrawati Jain temple site. The Digambara pairing of Shyama and Jvalamalini, the Sonagiri rock-cut image, Vijayamangalam (c. 678 CE) and Saavira Kambada Basadi (1430 CE) are from standard reference and temple listings. The moon-drinking pregnancy craving is deliberately absent: we could not locate it in Hemachandra or in any primary text and will not print an unsourced etymology. Know the source? Point us to it, and the correction is yours.