Whether the Restriction Is as Old as the Split Itself

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.