Jain cosmology locates the siddhas at a specific place, the Siddhashila, a crescent-shaped realm at the very summit of the universe, above the topmost heaven, where liberated souls are described as dwelling forever in undisturbed perfection, a precise cosmological answer to the question of where liberation actually leads that few other traditions attempt to state so concretely.
What follows from the doctrine of complete liberation is a point that distinguishes Jain devotion sharply from prayer in theistic religions: because a siddha has transcended all activity, including the capacity to act in the world or to respond to a petitioner, reciting homage to the siddhas in the Navkar Mantra cannot be a request for intervention or favour of any kind, since the being addressed is, by the very definition of its liberation, incapable of intervening. Jain teachers describe the purpose of the salutation instead as inspirational and purifying for the person reciting it, fixing the mind on the reality of perfected liberation as a guide and a goal rather than seeking any response from beings who, by their own perfection, can give none.
The same word carries an entirely different sense in the Hindu tantric and yogic traditions, where a siddha is a living adept who has attained supernatural powers, siddhis, through yogic practice, a figure still very much embodied and active in the world, in direct contrast to the Jain siddha's utter transcendence of embodiment and activity described above. A reader moving between Jain and Hindu religious vocabulary needs to keep the two senses separate; the shared root word points to accomplishment or perfection in both cases, but the two traditions describe almost opposite states by it.