The Jain schism

The traditional accounts

Each order tells the story to its own advantage. A Digambara account holds that during a twelve-year famine Bhadrabahu led part of the community south, and that those who remained in the north relaxed the discipline and adopted clothing; on the migrants' return the two groups could not be reconciled. A Svetambara account places the origin later, with a teacher named Sivabhuti who insisted on nudity and formed a breakaway.

Neither is reliable as history. Both are told from within a settled division and explain it by attributing innovation to the other side.

What historians say

The evidence suggests a gradual divergence rather than a single break. Sculpture at Mathura from the early centuries CE shows unclothed figures alongside details that later became Svetambara markers, and inscriptions from that period do not use the sectarian labels. The Valabhi council, at which the Svetambara canon was fixed, is generally treated as the point by which the separation was complete, since the Digambara rejection of that canon presupposes an existing division.

A range from roughly the first to the fifth century CE is usually given, with the process understood as the accumulation of differences over practice, canon and doctrine rather than an event.

What divides them

Three questions carry most of the weight: whether an advanced mendicant may wear clothing; whether the canon transmitted from Mahavira survives; and whether a woman can attain liberation in her present birth. Around these cluster further disagreements over whether an omniscient being takes food, over details of the tirthankaras' lives, and over the sex of the nineteenth tirthankara.

The orders share a great deal — the Tattvartha Sutra, the Namokar Mantra, the tirthankara series, the whole doctrinal apparatus of karma and liberation — and the division has not generally produced violence, but it has produced separate temples, separate mendicant lineages and separate literatures maintained for some fifteen hundred years.