Women can attain liberation

The Svetambara tradition affirms that women can attain final liberation (moksha) in a female body, on the same terms as men. Svetambara Jains hold that ascetic discipline does not require the complete nudity the Digambara demand, and therefore that women, who take the same vows and wear the same white robes as monks, are equally capable of the highest spiritual attainment. In support they cite the tradition that Malli, the nineteenth Tirthankara, was a woman.

Svetambara tradition further points to Chandanbala, said to have been the first woman ordained as a mendicant by Mahavira himself and traditionally remembered as heading an order of thirty-six thousand nuns, as concrete precedent within the earliest community for women's full ascetic and spiritual attainment. The tradition's confidence in women's capacity is reflected demographically as well as doctrinally: Svetambara nuns (sadhvis) substantially outnumber monks today, in some estimates by a ratio of three or four to one, making Jain nuns among the largest organised female monastic populations of any living religious tradition, a striking practical outcome of the doctrinal position that liberation is as open to a woman as to a man.

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.