acharyas/vijayanand.jpg · 1000×1250He was born in 1837 in the village of Lehra in Punjab, into a Hindu family; his father, Ganeshchandra, died when he was a small child. At sixteen, in 1853, he took diksha as a Sthanakvasi monk and was named Atmaram. Studying the Agamas closely, he became convinced that image worship had scriptural support. In 1876 at Ahmedabad he took fresh initiation into the Murtipujak tradition under Muni Buddhivijay (Buteraiji) and was named Anandvijay.
In 1886 the sangh of Palitana conferred on him the title of Acharya, and he became Vijayanand Suri, one of the first Svetambara Murtipujak monks in modern times to hold that title. He walked across Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat, founded temples and wrote in clear Hindi. Invited to the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, he could not travel abroad as a monk, so he prepared Virchand Gandhi to go instead. He died at Gujranwala in 1896.
