Jainism assigns each of its twenty-four Tirthankaras a pair of attendant guardian deities, a yaksha and a yakshi, whose role is to protect the Tirthankara's teaching and, in later devotional practice, to serve as an accessible focus of worship in a tradition where the liberated Tirthankaras themselves, having transcended the world entirely, are not understood to intervene in worldly affairs. Ambika fills this role for Neminatha, the twenty-second Tirthankara, exactly as Padmavati fills it for Parshvanatha, the twenty-third; the pattern repeats, with a different yakshi, across the full set of twenty-four.
What distinguishes Ambika within that pattern is the degree of devotional prominence she has independently acquired. Where many Tirthankara-yakshi pairs remain primarily doctrinal, named and depicted but not extensively worshipped in their own right, Ambika has become one of the most widely venerated yakshis in Svetambara Jain practice specifically, with dedicated shrines and a devotional following that in places exceeds the attention paid to some of the Tirthankaras she was originally appointed to guard. Scholars of Jain religion read this as evidence that the yakshi class of deities, formally subordinate to the Tirthankaras in doctrine, came over time to answer a devotional need, a more approachable, actively intervening divine figure, that the liberated and world-transcending Tirthankaras structurally could not meet.