Aryika

An aryika is a female ascetic in the Digambara tradition, and the separate term is required because the Digambara position does not allow her the same standing it gives the monk.

A different standing

The Digambara tradition holds that the highest ascetic practice includes complete nudity, the sky-clad state from which the tradition takes its name, and that liberation in the present life requires it, and since it does not permit women to practise nudity, it holds that a woman cannot attain the full standing of the highest ascetic or reach liberation from a female body, so the aryika, though a renunciant of great austerity, does not hold the same status as the male muni. The aryika wears a single white garment and keeps a rigorous discipline, but the doctrine assigns her a lower rung than the naked monk.

An old and real division

This is one of the sharpest of the doctrinal differences between the two great branches of Jainism, for the Svetambara tradition holds that women may take the full ascetic life and attain liberation, and indeed that one of the Tirthankaras was a woman, while the Digambara denies both, so the standing of the female ascetic is a real point of division rather than a matter of custom. The aryika thus embodies a specific and consequential doctrinal position, and the need for a separate term marks the Digambara refusal to grant her the standing the Svetambara gives its sadhvis. Within her tradition the aryika lives a life of severe renunciation, honoured as an ascetic, but under a doctrine that sets a limit on what a woman may attain.

Scholars of Jain history have questioned how far back the Digambara restriction on female liberation actually goes, noting that some early textual and iconographic evidence is ambiguous about the precise point at which the doctrine took its later, fully fixed form, and that the Digambara and Svetambara traditions may have hardened their opposing positions on this question gradually, over the centuries following their initial separation, rather than holding them in fully developed form from the very beginning of the split; the evidence is fragmentary enough that this remains a matter of historical argument rather than settled fact in either direction.

Whatever its exact origin, the doctrine has had a direct and lasting institutional effect on the aryika's standing within Digambara practice: because the tradition holds that a woman cannot undertake the highest, unclothed grade of ascetic practice, the aryika is formally ranked below the male muni within the Digambara ascetic hierarchy regardless of her years of practice or personal attainment, an institutional consequence of the doctrine that Digambara aryikas themselves live under and that distinguishes their formal standing sharply from that of a Svetambara sadhvi practising the same renunciation under the rival tradition's more permissive doctrine.