Women must be reborn as men to attain liberation

The Digambara tradition affirms that a woman cannot attain final liberation (moksha) directly from a female body, and must first be reborn as a man. The position follows from the Digambara insistence that the highest ascetic practice requires complete nudity and total non-possession, which they hold a woman cannot undertake; lacking access to the highest renunciation, the female practitioner advances spiritually but reaches liberation only after a male rebirth. This article describes the doctrinal position as the Digambara tradition holds it. The Digambara position is reinforced by a striking textual disagreement over the very identity of the nineteenth Tirthankara: where Svetambara scripture names this figure Malli and holds her to have been a woman, Digambara scripture names the same Tirthankara Mallinatha and holds him to have been male, so that the two branches do not merely interpret a shared story differently but transmit incompatible versions of their own canonical history.

Early Digambara commentators, including Kundakunda (traditionally placed in the early centuries CE), argued additionally that female physiology and social vulnerability make the itinerant, unclothed ascetic life practically as well as doctrinally unsuited to women, an argument later Digambara authors developed into a fuller philosophical case.

The claim is directly contested by the Svetambara tradition, which affirms that women can attain liberation and points to the tradition that the nineteenth ford-maker, Malli, was a woman. The disagreement over women and liberation is one of the defining doctrinal divisions between the two branches, bound up with their dispute over ascetic nudity and clothing.

Presenting the Digambara view without endorsing it, this entry notes that it stands within an intra-Jain debate in which the other major branch takes the opposite position. This disagreement over Mallinatha's sex is unusual even among sectarian disputes generally, since it is not simply a difference of doctrine about a shared figure but a divergence in the basic narrative content of scripture each branch considers authoritative; comparative studies of Jainism regularly cite it as the clearest illustration of how far Digambara and Svetambara canons diverged after their split. Svetambara authors, defending their account, point to the detail, found in their own textual tradition, that Malli's female birth was itself explained as a karmic consequence of a past life's minor deceit, a story that presupposes and defends the very possibility of female Tirthankara-hood that Digambara texts simply do not admit.