This site publishes under an organisation name and not a personal one. That removes one of the ordinary ways a reader decides whether to trust something, so we have to supply a different one. This page is it.
Below are two things. First, the errors we have published on this site, each with a date, what was wrong, why it was wrong and what it now says. Second, the claims circulating in Jain astrology that we have checked and found false or misleading, with the reasoning laid out so you can disagree with it.
Both lists exist for the same reason. An anonymous site cannot ask to be believed. It can only show its work and its mistakes, and let a reader decide. The rules we work by are set out on our method page.
How corrections work here
Four things, and they are commitments rather than aspirations.
We do not silently edit. A page that had a factual error keeps a dated entry here after it is fixed. Quietly changing a date and moving on is the cheapest thing a website can do, and it is why so little on the internet can be relied on.
Factual errors are urgent. A wrong date, nakshatra or attribution gets fixed as soon as we can verify the correction, because someone may be planning an observance around it. Questions of interpretation get a note on the page instead of a rewrite.
Convention is not error. A large share of apparent contradictions in Jain date material comes from purnimanta against amanta month naming, or from a tithi taken at a different city’s sunrise. Where that is the explanation, we say so and state the rule rather than changing a value.
Anyone can correct us. There is no reputation here that has to be protected, which makes this considerably easier than it is for most publishers.
Errata: errors we published
1 August 2026: our homepage gave the wrong date for Kshamavani
What we published. The Paryushan strip on the homepage labelled 25 September 2026 as Kshamavani.
Why that is wrong. 25 September 2026 is Ananta Chaturdashi, Bhadrapada Shukla 14, the tenth and closing day of the Digambara Das Lakshana Parva. Kshamavani is Ashvina Krishna 1, which falls after the intervening full moon, two days later, on 27 September 2026. They are different tithis in different fortnights, and they are different observances: one closes the ten days of contemplation, the other is the day of asking and giving forgiveness.
How it happened. The last day of a parva and the day of forgiveness get collapsed into each other constantly, including in printed calendars, and we reproduced the conflation in a summary strip. Our own Paryushana page had the two days correctly separated the whole time, so this was an internal inconsistency, which is the least excusable kind. A reader who trusted the homepage and did not click through would have had the wrong day.
What it says now. The homepage lists Digambara Das Lakshana as 16 to 25 September 2026 with Ananta Chaturdashi on 25 September, and Kshamavani as a separate line, 27 September 2026. The structured data for the Paryushana page emits Paryushan, Das Lakshana and Kshamavani as three distinct events with their own dates, so that no automated reader can flatten them back together. Corrected 1 August 2026.
One thing this does not settle. Shvetambara Samvatsari, on 15 September 2026, is also a day of forgiveness, and is a third distinct day from both of the above. Where your sangh’s published calendar differs from ours on any of this, follow your sangh.
Corrections to the wider record
These are not our errors. They are claims we found repeated widely, checked, and could not sustain. Each has a full page behind it.
The circulating “Mahavira birth chart” cannot be real
Search in Hindi for Bhagwan Mahavira’s kundali and one chart comes back, always the same: Capricorn rising with five planets in exaltation. It appears on blogs, in a national newspaper, in YouTube lectures and in an article by a Jain sadhvi. We traced it and tested it, and it fails on three separate grounds.
Provenance. The earliest instance we could locate is a blog post by Pandit P. N. Bhatt dated 2 April 2012, which gives no birth data and no source. Every later version we found traces back to that same unsourced figure. The most careful of them says the chart is “prevalent in many granthas” and names none. B. V. Raman’s Notable Horoscopes, the standard reference for historical charts, does not contain it, and no major panchang or astrology portal publishes a chart for any Tirthankara.
Scripture. The tradition does say, at Mahavira’s birth, that all planets were in their exaltations. But Jacobi bracketed that passage in his translation and footnoted why: it is missing from his oldest manuscript, and the commentator recorded that it was not seen in many books. The word for exaltation, ucca, is a Greek-derived technical term that entered India around 300 CE, so the sentence is a later insertion. It also names no planet and no sign, and it is not unique to Mahavira: the same formula appears at the births of Ajitanatha, Sambhavanatha, Padmaprabha, Vimalanatha, Shantinatha and Kunthunatha. It is a birth-auspiciousness formula, offered in the same breath as clear skies and a pleasant breeze.
The sky. We scanned the ephemeris from 3000 BCE to 500 CE for the chart’s core configuration. It occurs in four years across that span: 1818 BCE, 964 BCE, 50 BCE and 188 CE. There is no match anywhere between 700 and 400 BCE, which covers every traditional and scholarly date proposed for Mahavira. Separately, the Kalpasutra places the birth in the middle of the night, and under ten different ayanamsas the rising sign at local midnight on the traditional date is Sagittarius, not Capricorn.
The article that reads the chart most carefully also contains the objection that undoes it, noting in passing that the twelve zodiac signs were not in use in Mahavira’s time, and then reading a sign-based chart anyway. We hold no view about the devotion of anyone who has shared the chart in good faith. The objection is to the chart.
Most Jain date contradictions are a naming convention, not a disagreement
Two sources give the same Tirthankara two different birth months, and the reader concludes one of them is wrong. Usually neither is.
An Indian lunar month is counted two ways. Purnimanta months end at the full moon, so the dark fortnight falls in the second half. Amanta months end at the new moon, so the dark fortnight falls first. The days are the same days. Only the label moves, and it moves only for dark-fortnight dates.
The rule
For any Krishna paksha date, the amanta month name is one month earlier than the purnimanta name. Shukla paksha dates are identical in both systems. Rishabhanatha's birth, given by Hemachandra as Chaitra Krishna 8, is the same day a Gujarati panchang calls Fagan Vad 8.
Hemachandra uses purnimanta, so our kalyanaka calendar is purnimanta and says so in the caption of every table. Gujarati and Marathi practice is amanta. That single rule resolves most of the apparent contradictions between Jain date sources, and almost nobody states it, which is why the same disagreement gets rediscovered and re-argued indefinitely. If you find an offset on a Shukla date, the rule does not explain it and one of us has made a real error. Tell us.
Still open
Some things are not corrected because they are not settled.
Mahavira’s chronology is genuinely disputed. The traditional nirvana date of 527 BCE is an arithmetic result rather than a record, no inscription or coin or foreign synchronism attaches to him anywhere, and the scholarly proposals run from 527 BCE to about 425 BCE. We report the range rather than choosing.
In our own tables, Sumatinatha’s nirvana nakshatra and Shitalanatha’s diksha tithi are flagged for further verification and should not be quoted from us as settled. Suparshvanatha’s chyavana and kevala paksha are blank because the source does not state them. On the Abhinandananatha page a mismatch between the Mithuna and Abhijit data is left unresolved rather than smoothed.
Sect differences are not on this list, because they are not errors. Where Shvetambara and Digambara sources differ, or where sanghs keep Samvatsari on Shukla 4 and Shukla 5, both readings go on the page labelled by tradition, and your own sangh’s practice governs.
Tell us we are wrong
Use the contact form or write to [email protected]. Send the URL, the sentence or table row, what you believe the correct value is, and where you are getting it from. An edition and chapter, a published panchang or your sangh’s calendar are all usable. Corrections are seva, and they are the most useful thing a reader can send us.
Where a correction changes a page, it appears here with a date. Where it does not, we will usually still write back and say why.
Sources and method. The Kshamavani correction follows the tithi at sunrise: Ananta Chaturdashi is Bhadrapada Shukla 14 and Kshamavani is Ashvina Krishna 1, computed as described on our method page and set out in full on Paryushana 2026. The Mahavira chart summary condenses the full investigation, which cites Jacobi's translation of the Kalpasutra with his bracket and footnote, Johnson's translation of Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, the published instances of the chart individually, and ephemeris testing with the Swiss Ephemeris (Moshier model) independently reproduced with Meeus algorithms. The purnimanta and amanta rule is standard Indian calendrical practice, applied to Hemachandra's usage throughout the kalyanaka calendar. Corrections are seva: tell us.