Svetambara Jainism

Svetambara Jainism is the tradition of the white-clad. Its ascetics — monks and nuns alike — wear simple unstitched white cloth, carry a begging bowl and a soft brush of woollen threads called the rajoharan, and travel on foot. It is the majority Jain tradition in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Mumbai and across most of the diaspora, and it is the tradition that preserved the Agamas — the canonical scriptures — as surviving text rather than as a memory of something lost.

The name itself is a contrast. Sveta is white and ambara is garment; the other great tradition is Digambara, sky-clad, whose most senior monks keep no clothing at all. That single visible difference stands in for a set of disagreements about scripture, about the life of Mahavira, and about who is capable of liberation — disagreements that hardened over several centuries after Mahavira's nirvana rather than appearing at once.

What Svetambara Jains hold

On doctrine proper there is almost nothing between the traditions. Both hold ahimsa, non-violence in thought, speech and action, to be the first principle. Both hold anekantavada, the many-sidedness of reality, and aparigraha, non-possession. Both accept the same account of the soul, of karma as a physical substance that binds to it, and of the path by which that binding is stopped and shed. Both venerate the same twenty-four Tirthankaras and accept the Tattvartha Sutra as an authoritative summary.

The differences are these:

The dispute over stri-moksha — whether a woman can attain liberation without first being reborn as a man — is the sharpest of them, and it is a real theological difference rather than a matter of custom. Svetambara texts answer plainly that she can, and hold up Malli as the case in point. It follows that Svetambara nuns are ascetics on the same path as monks, not on a preparatory one, and Svetambara orders have historically had far more nuns than monks.

The three living traditions

Svetambara Jainism is not one organisation. Three distinct traditions have emerged within it, and a Svetambara Jain will usually identify with one of them.

Murtipujak

The Murtipujak — image-worshipping, also called Deravasi or Mandirmargi, temple-goers — are the oldest and largest branch. They worship consecrated images of the Tirthankaras in temples, perform puja with water, sandal paste, flowers, incense, lamp, rice, sweet and fruit, and keep the full ritual calendar including Snatra Puja. Their ascetics wear the muhpatti mouth-cloth in the hand and hold it before the mouth when speaking, rather than tying it on permanently.

Murtipujak ascetics are organised into gacchas, lineages of teachers with their own conventions and their own dates for some observances. Tapa Gaccha is by far the largest; Kharatara Gaccha, Achala Gaccha and Payachanda Gaccha are the other surviving ones. When two Svetambara families in the same city keep Paryushan on slightly different days, the gaccha is usually why.

Sthanakvasi

The Sthanakvasi hold that image worship has no basis in the Agamas. They meet not in temples but in plain halls called sthanaks — the name means those who use a sthanak — where the focus is on scripture, discourse, pratikraman and meditation rather than on ritual before an image. The tradition traces itself to a seventeenth-century reform movement associated with Lavji Rishi, itself following an earlier fifteenth-century movement led by Lonka Shah.

Sthanakvasi ascetics wear the muhpatti tied across the mouth at all times, not only while speaking — the most immediately recognisable marker of the tradition. The reasoning is the same as the Murtipujak one, taken further: air carries one-sensed life, and the cloth is a continuous guard against harming it with the breath.

Terapanth

Terapanth was founded in 1760 by Acharya Bhikshu, who left the Sthanakvasi order over questions of ascetic discipline. It too rejects image worship. Its distinctive feature is organisational: the entire order is led by a single acharya, with one line of succession, one code and one set of instructions for every ascetic. Where other traditions are federations of lineages, Terapanth is a single body, and it has used that unity to run an unusually organised programme of education, publication and public teaching.

Where Svetambara Jains are

Svetambara Jainism is concentrated in western India — Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Jain population of Mumbai — and in the emigrant communities that came from there, which is most of the Jain diaspora in East Africa, the United Kingdom, North America and the Gulf. Digambara Jainism predominates in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Bundelkhand. The great Svetambara pilgrimage sites are Shatrunjaya at Palitana, Girnar, Ranakpur, the Dilwara temples at Mount Abu, and Sammed Shikharji in Jharkhand — the last of which is held sacred by both traditions.

What this means in practice

For a lay Svetambara Jain, the tradition shows up as a specific calendar and a specific set of practices: eight days of Paryushan ending in Samvatsari rather than ten days of Das Lakshana; the Kalpa Sutra read aloud across those eight days; Navpad Oli twice a year; chaturmas vows taken when the ascetics settle for the monsoon; and, in Murtipujak households, daily darshan at the temple.

None of this is a claim that one tradition is correct and the other is not. Jain teaching on anekantavada cuts against exactly that reading: the two traditions describe the same path from different standpoints, and both have kept it alive for two and a half millennia. What this guide describes is what Svetambara Jains do, and why.