Avicenna
Avicenna was born in Afshana, a village near Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan), the capital of the Samanids, a Persian dynasty in Central Asia and Greater Khorasan. His mother, named Sitāra, was from Bukhara; his father, Abdullāh, was a respected Ismaili scholar from Balkh, an important town of the Samanid Empire, in what is today Balkh Province, Afghanistan. His father worked in the government of Samanid in the village Kharmasain, a Sunni regional power. After five years, his younger brother, Mahmoud, was born. Avicenna first began to learn the Quran and literature in such a way that when he was ten years old he had essentially learned all of them.
Parshvanatha
Parshvanatha is said in Jain texts to have been born in Benares (Varanasi, India), renounced the worldly life and founded an ascetic community. Texts of two major Jain sects – Digambaras and "Śvētāmbara"s have two different sets of views about the teachings of Parshvanatha and Mahavira and this has been one of the many foundations of the disputes between these two sub-traditions. The Digambara sect maintains tha there was no difference in teachings of Parshvanatha and Mahavira. According to "Śvētāmbaras", Mahavira expanded the scope of Parshvanatha's first four restraints, with his ideas on "Ahimsa" (non-violence) and added the fifth monastic vow of celibacy in the practice of asceticism. Parshvanatha, in contrast, according to them, had not required celibacy and had allowed the wearing of simple outer garments by monks. Digambaras disagree with the interpretations of "Śvētāmbara" sect. "Śvētāmbara" texts, such as section 2.15 of "Acharanga Sutra", state that Mahavira's parents were followers of Parshvanatha, linking Mahavira to a pre-existing theology and as a reformer of pre-existing Jain mendicant tradition.