The Sthanakvasi tradition traces its roots to Lonka Shah, a fifteenth century merchant and scribe from Gujarat who, through his work copying Jain manuscripts, concluded that image worship in temples had no clear basis in the earliest scriptural layer of Svetambara Jainism and represented a later accretion rather than an original practice. Lonka's critique circulated during his own lifetime, but the organized monastic movement built on his ideas, the Sthanakvasi tradition proper, took shape gradually over the following two centuries, reaching a more settled institutional form by the seventeenth century.
Sthanakvasi communities reject the veneration of Tirthankara images that is central to temple practice in the larger Murtipujaka Svetambara tradition, meeting instead in plain halls called sthanaks for prayer, scriptural study and teaching, without the images, ritual offerings or temple architecture that mark Murtipujaka practice. Sthanakvasi monks and nuns also wear a cloth covering over the mouth, the muhapatti, at all times rather than only during specific rituals, a visible marker of their tradition's distinct approach to non-violence, intended to minimize harm to airborne microorganisms.
The movement organized its own monastic lineages independent of the image-venerating tradition it had separated from, and Sthanakvasi teaching, ritual calendar and community structure developed along a recognizably distinct path from the seventeenth century onward while remaining within the wider Svetambara fold.