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.