The One Ford-Maker the Branches Dispute

Mallinatha, the nineteenth Tirthankara of the present age, is the subject of the sharpest single disagreement between Jainism's two great communities. The Svetambara tradition holds that Malli was a woman, the only female among the twenty-four ford-makers; the Digambara tradition holds that all Tirthankaras, this one included, were male. The emblem is the water-pot (kalasha).

The difference is doctrinal, not incidental. The Digambara hold that final liberation requires the complete renunciation symbolised by monastic nudity, and that a woman cannot in her present body attain the highest state, a soul must first be reborn as a man; on this view a female Tirthankara is impossible. The Svetambara affirm that women can attain moksha (their order of nuns is large and ancient) and preserve, in their canonical Jnatadharmakatha, the story of Malli as a woman. The dispute over this single figure thus opens directly onto one of the tradition's deepest divisions, over the body, renunciation, and the spiritual capacity of women.