Against the Digambara View

This affirmation stands in direct opposition to the Digambara position that a woman must first be reborn as a man to reach liberation, and the two views form one of the principal doctrinal divisions within Jainism. The Svetambara stance is bound up with their acceptance of clothed asceticism, since it removes the barrier the Digambara raise from the requirement of nudity. The entry presents the Svetambara affirmation as the branch holds it, within a long-standing internal Jain debate. The two branches disagree similarly about the biography of Mahavira, the tradition's own founder: Svetambara texts hold that he married Yashoda and had a daughter, Priyadarshana, before renouncing the world at around age thirty, while Digambara texts hold that he remained unmarried and celibate throughout his life.

As with the dispute over Malli's sex, each branch's account of the founder's life is consistent with, and arguably shaped by, its wider position on gender and renunciation, the Svetambara willingness to combine an ordinary household past with eventual liberation mirroring its openness to female liberation, and the Digambara insistence on a lifelong ascetic purity mirroring its stricter standard for who can attain moksha at all.