Liberation and Rebirth as a Man

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.