tirthankaras/tk-13-vimalanatha.jpg · 1200×1600Vimala means stainless, clear. During the pregnancy the queen's body and mind are said to have become entirely free of impurity.
Kampilya, his birthplace on the Ganga in today's Farrukhabad district, was the old capital of southern Panchala and appears in the Mahabharata — real geography attached to a figure the tradition places unimaginably far back. His name lives on in Jain history through Vimala Shah, the 11th-century Gujarati minister who built the Vimala Vasahi at Dilwara on Mount Abu, the first of its famous marble temples.
