Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Sky-Clad, and What the Nudity Is For

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Sky-Clad, and What the Nudity Is For

Digambara means sky-clad, and the practice the name records is the most visible difference within Jainism: the fully advanced male ascetic owns nothing whatever, including clothing, and goes naked.

The reasoning is not exhibitionist and is not incidental. Jainism holds that the soul is bound by karma, understood as a subtle physical substance that adheres through attachment and action, and that liberation requires its complete removal. Possession is attachment. A garment is a possession, a preference, a thing to be protected and replaced; and shame at its absence is itself an attachment to the body and to the opinion of others. The Digambara position is that the logic admits no exception, and that a tradition permitting the ascetic a robe has stopped short of what its own analysis requires.

Two further positions follow. The tradition holds that a kevalin, one who has attained omniscience, no longer takes food, the body of such a being no longer requiring it. And it holds that a woman cannot attain liberation in a female birth and must first be reborn male, a position argued partly from the impossibility of her practising complete nudity and partly from a claim about bodily capacity, and rejected outright by the other Jain tradition. That disagreement was fought out in public debate, notably in 1124, and it remains the sharpest doctrinal division in the religion.

Nuns in the Digambara tradition wear a single white cloth and are not counted as full ascetics, which follows from the same reasoning and is exactly the point at which the tradition's critics say the reasoning costs more than it is worth.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.