The Tattvartha Sutra, cited throughout this collection as the systematic charter of Jain metaphysics, has an author whose identity is itself a live and pointed dispute between the two major Jain communities, making the text's own authorship a case study in how differently the Digambara and Svetambara traditions can read the same shared document.
Both communities revere the text and attribute it to a figure generally called Umasvati by the Svetambara tradition and Umaswami by the Digambara tradition, a variation in name that signals a deeper disagreement: the two traditions hold different biographical accounts of the author, disagree over his precise dates, generally placed between the second and fifth centuries CE, and transmit meaningfully different versions of the text, with variant readings, different arrangements of material, and, in places, doctrinal differences that track the Digambara-Svetambara division on other matters, including whether liberation is possible in a female body, an issue also central to the dispute over Kevala jnana discussed elsewhere.
The text's unusual status, accepted as authoritative by both communities despite disagreements over authorship, wording and doctrine, is itself notable: no other Jain text commands comparable cross-communal authority, and scholars generally treat the shared reverence for a text whose author neither community can agree on as evidence that the Tattvartha Sutra achieved its authority before the Digambara-Svetambara split had fully hardened into the separate transmission histories that later preserved, and subtly reshaped, the same underlying work.