Religious Roles & Titles
Shravika
Also Known As Sravika · Jain laywoman · Sravika; Jain laywoman
Jainism Roles
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Origin 500 BCE to 400 BCE
A lay Jain woman, and the fourth division of the community Mahavira is held to have founded. She takes the same limited vows as a shravaka and follows the same graded lay discipline.
The category is not decorative. Jain lay religious life runs heavily through women: the domestic observance of the dietary rules, the filtering of water, the timing of meals before dark, the preparation of food that ascetics may accept, and the transmission of the practice to children are largely their work, and the observance of fasts is disproportionately female. The long public fasts that Jain communities honour with processions are frequently kept by women, and the ayambil observances likewise.
Shravikas support the ascetic orders, and in the Svetambara community they are the population from which its large body of nuns is drawn, nuns who outnumber monks considerably.
Their position illustrates the split between the two orders from a different angle. Both traditions accept the shravika as a full member of the fourfold community with the same lay vows as a man. They diverge entirely on what is open to her beyond that: the Svetambara tradition holds she may take the great vows in full and be liberated in that birth, the Digambara tradition holds she may not. The lay category is shared; what it leads to is not.
Facts
Attestation
Veneration TodayActively venerated in a living tradition 1 Source is a contemporary sociological study of living Jain practice. Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Origins
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The Jain Laywoman of the Fourfold Community
A shravika is a lay Jain woman, the fourth division of the community that Mahavira is held to have founded, taking the same limited vows as the layman and sharing his role in the world.
The householder discipline
The shravika, like the shravaka, is a hearer of the teaching who lives as a householder rather than a renunciant, observing the lesser vows suited to lay life, the restrained forms of non-violence, truthfulness, restraint and the rest, and supporting the ascetic community by alms and service, so her religious life is that of the devout layperson bound by a discipline adapted to the householder. She keeps the fasts and observances of the tradition, and the maintenance of the strict Jain dietary discipline in the home falls largely to the laywomen.
A full division of the community
The shravika completes the fourfold community of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen that the tradition traces to Mahavira, so the laywoman, like the layman, holds a recognised place in the structure of the religion, and the four divisions together make up the whole Jain community. The lay Jains, men and women, are the material support of the ascetics and the great majority of the community, and their observance sustains the tradition in the world while the ascetics carry its fuller practice. The shravika thus represents the ordinary devout Jain woman, and her inclusion as one of the four divisions marks the recognition, in the very structure of the community, that the religion is carried by its laity as well as by its renunciants.
The Long Fasts Most Often Kept by Laywomen
Among the demanding voluntary fasts Jain lay tradition offers, one of the most extreme, varshi tap, involves alternate-day fasting sustained for an entire year, broken only by a specific ritual meal at its conclusion, and observation of Jain communities has repeatedly noted that shravikas undertake this and other extended fasts in disproportionately large numbers compared to shravakas, making sustained lay fasting practice, in observed practice if not in formal doctrine, a substantially female-led feature of everyday Jain religious life.
The shorter, communally observed Samvatsari fast that closes the annual Paryushana festival, when the whole community, ascetic and lay alike, is expected to fast and then to ask forgiveness of others for wrongs committed over the year, draws participation from shravakas and shravikas alike, but it is the more demanding, individually undertaken long fasts, sustained privately over weeks or months rather than for a single communal day, where the laywoman's central role in the devotional life of the household becomes most visible, and where Jain communities most often single out women for particular religious honour and recognition within the congregation.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Element Of
The lay Jain woman is the fourth division of the community.
Held, on the same fourfold division of the community.
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