Dr. N.L. Kachhara
Bhagvan Mahavira gained omniscience on the tenth day of the dark fortnight of Vaisakha month (the 2nd month of the Indian calendar)on the bank of the river Rajuvalka, after a long period of penance and meditation of about twelve and half years. By a series of unprecedented spiritual efforts, he eliminated all of the psychical karma covering the natural psychical powers of his soul. This resulted in a state of the soul with infinite intelligence, self-awareness, bliss and spiritual energy. A common human soul veiled with psychical karma is possessed of right knowledge as well as wrong knowledge, with ignorance outweighing right knowledge by a large measure. Because of ignorance, the soul is not able to perceive the real truth. When ignorance is eliminated with the annihilation of intelligence-obscuring karma, the intelligence becomes boundless. The intelligence and knowledge of the Omniscient has to be necessarily boundless for ignorance to be absent.
The first public exposition of the omniscience of Bhagvan Mahavira was made in the first Samavasarana (religious congregation), in which eleven Vedic scholars received fully satisfactory replies to their doubts. All of these scholars were renowned exponents of the Vedas but had some doubts regarding the soul, cosmology, etc. that no one could answer. They thought that if great scholars like them were not able to find answers to these questions, no one else could do so. When they came to know that Gods and people were rushing to the Samavasaran of Mahavira and not coming to their own yajna, the scholars’ pride was hurt. They thought that no scholar could surpass them: hence they decided to test the wisdom of Mahavira by posing their doubts as questions to him. These doubts of the Vedic scholars are also the general doubts of many scholars today, who may find the answers by Mahavira to be very educational.
