Digambara (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on the Digambara sect of Jainism. Reliable for the standard scholarly account of the Digambara-Svetambara division: the Digambara legend of a famine-driven migration south to Karnataka under Bhadrabahu during Chandragupta Maurya's reign, the article's own explicit caution that both sects' origin accounts are partisan and unreliable and that the earliest written Digambara version dates only from the tenth century CE, and its judgment that the split was more likely a gradual development completed by the first century CE rather than a single dateable event.