Svetambara

Practice

The name means white-clad. Svetambara mendicants wear simple white garments and carry a small set of permitted possessions: an alms bowl, a broom of soft wool for sweeping the ground before them, and in the Sthanakvasi and Terapanthi sub-traditions a cloth worn permanently over the mouth to avoid harming organisms in the air.

The doctrinal position is that the vow of non-possession concerns attachment rather than objects, and that a minimal garment held without attachment does not constitute possession. Against the Digambara claim that this is a compromise, Svetambara writers argue that mendicancy is a discipline of the mind and that nakedness is neither necessary nor, in most climates and societies, practicable.

The canon

The Svetambara preserve a canon of some forty-five texts, the Agamas, which they hold to descend from the teaching of Mahavira through his chief disciples. The tradition records that the texts were transmitted orally, that a first recension was made at a council at Pataliputra, and that they were fixed in writing at a council at Valabhi in Gujarat, conventionally placed in the fifth century CE.

The Digambara reject this canon as reconstructed rather than transmitted. The dispute is not merely sectarian: it means that the two orders work from substantially different bodies of scripture, and that a great deal of Jain narrative literature, including the lives of the tirthankaras, exists in Svetambara recension only.

Women

The Svetambara hold that a woman can attain liberation without an intervening male birth, and count Mallinatha, the nineteenth tirthankara, as a woman. Digambara tradition treats the same figure as male. The Svetambara order has long had far more nuns than monks, a ratio unusual among Indian ascetic traditions and sustained into the present.

Sub-traditions and distribution

The Svetambara divide further. The Murtipujaka worship images in temples; the Sthanakvasi, from the fifteenth century, reject image worship; the Terapanthi, from the eighteenth, are organised under a single acharya. Svetambara Jains are concentrated in Gujarat and Rajasthan, and their temple and manuscript wealth at Patan, Jaisalmer and Cambay preserved libraries of exceptional importance.