acharyas/vidyasagar.jpg · 1000×1250He was born Vidyadhar on Sharad Purnima, 10 October 1946, in Sadalga, Belagavi district, to Mallappa and Shrimanti. Drawn to renunciation from youth, he took initiation as a Digambara muni on 30 June 1968 at Ajmer from Acharya Gyansagar, and was made an acharya in 1972.
For more than fifty years he walked barefoot across India. He initiated around five hundred Digambara monks and many nuns — more than any acharya in modern times — and inspired a remarkable range of work: Pratibhasthali residential schools for girls, hundreds of gaushalas for the care of animals, and a revival of handloom weaving so that people could earn a living without violence.
He was also a poet. His Hindi epic Mookmati (“The Silent Earth”) tells the spiritual journey of a lump of clay that becomes a sacred water pot — and is studied in university Hindi programmes. On 18 February 2024, at Chandragiri Tirth in Dongargarh, Chhattisgarh, he completed his life through sallekhana, having named Muni Samaysagar as his successor. He was a son of Karnataka whose teaching reached every corner of India.
