Mallinatha

Mallinatha, the nineteenth Tirthankara of the present age, is the subject of the sharpest single disagreement between Jainism's two great communities. The Svetambara tradition holds that Malli was a woman, the only female among the twenty-four ford-makers; the Digambara tradition holds that all Tirthankaras, this one included, were male. The emblem is the water-pot (kalasha).

The difference is doctrinal, not incidental. The Digambara hold that final liberation requires the complete renunciation symbolised by monastic nudity, and that a woman cannot in her present body attain the highest state, a soul must first be reborn as a man; on this view a female Tirthankara is impossible. The Svetambara affirm that women can attain moksha (their order of nuns is large and ancient) and preserve, in their canonical Jnatadharmakatha, the story of Malli as a woman. The dispute over this single figure thus opens directly onto one of the tradition's deepest divisions, over the body, renunciation, and the spiritual capacity of women.

In the Svetambara account, Malli was a princess of Mithila, daughter of King Kumbha and Queen Prabhavati, of surpassing beauty and accomplishment. Six kings, having learned of her, each sought her hand, and her father found himself unable to refuse any without offending the rest.

The narrative's memorable turn is Malli's response. She had a hollow golden image of herself made in her exact likeness, and into it, through an opening at the crown, she dropped each day a morsel of food. When the six suitors were at last brought before the statue they took it for the princess herself; then Malli opened it, and the stench of the accumulated, rotting food poured out, a demonstration that beneath even the most beautiful body lies only decay. The teaching in non-attachment turned the six from desire to renunciation, and Malli herself renounced the world and attained the state of a Jina. The episode is related as the tradition's sacred narrative rather than as documented history.

Because of the Svetambara claim, Mallinatha is the figure most often cited in modern discussion of gender within Jainism, of the tradition's long, internal argument over whether a woman may attain liberation, an argument the two branches answer differently and that the Malli story crystallises. Scholars treat the divergence as a window onto the doctrinal and social history of the communities rather than as a matter to be settled.

Mallinatha is venerated by both branches, as a woman by the Svetambara, as a man by the Digambara, as a fully liberated soul and omniscient ford-maker, and is held to have attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). Like the other ford-makers of the present avasarpini, the figure belongs to Jain sacred history rather than to the documented past.

The Svetambara scripture that preserves the fullest form of the story, the Jnatadharmakatha, relates that Malli, having been born a princess and sought by several kings as a bride, had a hollow golden image of her own likeness made, its cavity filled daily with the remains of the food she ate; when her rejected suitors were shown the image after weeks of rotting inside it, she used the stench and corruption of what was once fresh to teach them the impermanence of physical beauty, and renounced the world at their assembled realisation of the point.