Jainism

Tradition·Founded c. 550 BCE·est. ~4–5 million worldwide

Vedic Religion → Jainism

Branch
Community of Jainism

Sky-clad and white-clad.

Digambara monks wear nothing and carry a peacock-feather whisk and a gourd; Svetambara monastics wear white and carry a wool whisk, and some tie a cloth permanently over the mouth. Underneath the clothes sit two real questions — whether the original scriptures survived, and whether a woman can be liberated as a woman — and neither has ever been settled.

How you joinBirth, and it determines your temples, your texts and your monks
Who leadsDigambara monks wear nothing at all and carry a peacock-feather whisk and a water gourd; Svetambara monastics wear white and carry a wool whisk. Behind the clothing sit two real disagreements: whether the original scriptures survived, and whether a woman can be liberated from a female body
The unitTwo orders, separated by roughly the first century
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The Digambara–Svetambara division is usually dated to around the first century CE and is traditionally associated with a twelve-year famine during which part of the community migrated south under Bhadrabahu, returning to find that those who stayed had relaxed the rule of nudity. The visible difference is clothing: Digambara monks — sky-clad — wear nothing at all and possess only a picchi, a whisk of shed peacock feathers, and a kamandalu, a wooden water gourd. Svetambara monastics wear white, carry a wool rajoharan, and in the Sthanakvasi and Terapanth orders wear a muhpatti tied permanently across the mouth. Underneath sit substantive disagreements: whether the original canon survived; whether a woman can attain liberation in a female body; whether an omniscient being still requires food; and a set of differences in the biography of Mahavira, including whether he married. Digambaras are concentrated in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, Svetambaras in Gujarat and Rajasthan. They share the Tattvartha Sutra, the Namokar mantra, most of the ethics, and a number of pilgrimage sites, some of which — notably Sammed Shikharji and Bahubali sites — have generated long-running legal disputes over control.

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