A Point of Sectarian Dispute

The claim is directly contested by the Svetambara tradition, which affirms that women can attain liberation and points to the tradition that the nineteenth ford-maker, Malli, was a woman. The disagreement over women and liberation is one of the defining doctrinal divisions between the two branches, bound up with their dispute over ascetic nudity and clothing.

Presenting the Digambara view without endorsing it, this entry notes that it stands within an intra-Jain debate in which the other major branch takes the opposite position. This disagreement over Mallinatha's sex is unusual even among sectarian disputes generally, since it is not simply a difference of doctrine about a shared figure but a divergence in the basic narrative content of scripture each branch considers authoritative; comparative studies of Jainism regularly cite it as the clearest illustration of how far Digambara and Svetambara canons diverged after their split. Svetambara authors, defending their account, point to the detail, found in their own textual tradition, that Malli's female birth was itself explained as a karmic consequence of a past life's minor deceit, a story that presupposes and defends the very possibility of female Tirthankara-hood that Digambara texts simply do not admit.