Digambara

Nudity

The name means sky-clad. Digambara doctrine holds that possession of any kind, including clothing, is incompatible with the complete non-attachment liberation requires, and that a mendicant at the highest stage therefore goes naked. This is confined to fully initiated male mendicants; lay Jains and junior mendicants are clothed, and the practice is largely restricted to particular regions and occasions in modern India.

The position is not merely ascetic austerity but doctrinal. If clothing is a possession, and possession is bondage, then a clothed mendicant has not completed the renunciation. The Svetambara counter-argument — that the vow concerns attachment rather than the object, and that a minimal garment does not constitute possession — is the pivot of the dispute between the orders.

The canon

Digambara hold that the teaching transmitted from Mahavira was progressively lost, and that the canon the Svetambara preserve is not authentic. What they accept instead are later systematic works: the Satkhandagama and the Kasayapahuda, and above all the writings of Kundakunda, whose Samayasara treats the soul from an absolute standpoint, and Umasvati's Tattvartha Sutra, which both orders accept.

This has a consequence for scholarship. Where Svetambara material offers narrative and canonical texts, Digambara material is strongest in systematic philosophy, and the Digambara contribution to Jain logic, epistemology and mathematics is correspondingly large.

Women and liberation

Digambara doctrine holds that a woman cannot attain liberation in her present birth, on the reasoning that she cannot undertake complete nudity and therefore cannot complete the mendicant path. A woman may be reborn as a man and liberated then. The Svetambara hold the contrary, and count the nineteenth tirthankara, Mallinatha, as female — a figure the Digambara accordingly regard as male.

The dispute generated a substantial polemical literature from the early centuries CE onward, and remains the most-discussed doctrinal difference between the orders.

Distribution

Digambara Jains are concentrated in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, with the great southern sites at Shravanabelagola and the cave temples at Ellora among their principal centres. The colossal image of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola, anointed every twelve years, is the most visible Digambara monument.