Religious Roles & Titles
Sadhvi
Also Known As Svetambara nun · female ascetic
Jainism Roles
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Origin 500 BCE to 400 BCE
A Jain nun in the Svetambara tradition, bound by the same five great vows as a monk and living the same mendicant life.
Sadhvis substantially outnumber monks, and have done for a very long time, a fact worth stating plainly, because Jainism is often described through its male ascetics. The female ascetic orders are large, organised, and in several lineages have their own leadership, teaching and scholarly reputation.
The Svetambara position is that a woman can take the great vows in full and attain liberation in that birth. It holds further that the nineteenth of the twenty-four tirthankaras, Mallinatha, was a woman. Both claims are rejected by the Digambara tradition, which holds that liberation requires the complete renunciation that includes clothing, that this is not open to women, and that a woman must therefore be reborn in a male body first. The two orders consequently disagree about the sex of one of their own founding teachers, and the disagreement follows from a doctrine about who can be liberated rather than from any dispute about the historical record.
Because the Digambara tradition does not accept that a woman can take the great vows in full, its female ascetics are not counted as full ascetics and are given a different standing, that of the aryika.
Facts
Organisation
OrdinationRestricted to women 1Tradition: Jainism The order of nuns OrdinationCelibacy required of the ordained 1Tradition: Jainism Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Attestation
Veneration TodayActively venerated in a living tradition 2 Source is a contemporary sociological study of living Jain practice. Attributions
TraditionJainism (Svetambara tradition) 1 Origins
Origin Period Learn More
The Jain Nun of the White-Clad Tradition
A sadhvi is a Jain nun in the Svetambara tradition, bound by the same five great vows as a monk and living the same mendicant life.
The mendicant life
The sadhvi renounces home and possessions and takes the five great vows, of non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, celibacy and non-attachment, in their most rigorous form, and lives as a wandering mendicant, walking from place to place, begging her food, and keeping the strict discipline of the Jain ascetic, so her life is that of the renunciant in full, differing from the monk in standing rather than in the austerity of the practice. The Svetambara sadhvis wear the plain white cloth of their tradition, and their discipline of non-violence is exacting, extending to the smallest living things.
Numbers and standing
A notable feature of Jain monasticism is that the nuns substantially outnumber the monks, and have done so through much of its recorded history, so the sadhvis are the larger part of the ascetic community, a fact that distinguishes Jainism from many traditions in which male renunciants predominate. Entry is by renunciation and initiation into the order under an acharya. Within the Svetambara tradition the sadhvis carry the full mendicant life, and though the highest offices of the order remain generally held by men, the scale and rigour of the female ascetic community give the sadhvi a central place in the living practice of Jainism, and she is honoured among the monks in the salutation of the ascetics in the daily prayer.
A Discipline That Still Refuses the Wheel
Consistent with the vow of non-violence carried to its most rigorous extreme, Jain ascetics, sadhvis included, traditionally travel only on foot, refusing all wheeled transport, including in the modern period cars, trains and bicycles, on the reasoning that mechanised travel risks crushing small living beings the traveller cannot see and takes the ascetic further from the simplicity and hardship the mendicant vow requires; a sadhvi may therefore walk considerable distances between towns over the course of a preaching tour lasting months, a visible and physically demanding form of the same non-violence that shapes the Jain diet.
Many Svetambara ascetics, sadhvis prominently among them, also wear a muhapatti, a cloth held or tied across the mouth, to avoid inadvertently inhaling or harming tiny airborne organisms, a practice that together with barefoot walking makes the sadhvi immediately recognisable in public and that some modern reform-minded Jains have debated relaxing for practical reasons, without any such relaxation being generally adopted, since the walking and the mouth-covering are both understood as direct expressions of non-violence rather than as customs separable from the vow itself.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Sadhvi is the Svetambara term for a nun.
Element Of
The Svetambara nun takes the same five great vows as a monk and lives under the same discipline, and Svetambara nuns considerably outnumber the monks.
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