Monks and nuns wear white robes (white-clad)

Svetambara Jain monks and nuns affirm the wearing of simple white robes; the name Svetambara means "white-clad." They hold that a minimal garment is compatible with the vow of non-possession and that clothing is not itself an insurmountable attachment, so that the ascetic may keep a few white cloths along with a small set of permitted implements such as an alms-bowl and a broom to sweep insects from the path. Nuns and monks alike follow the practice. Svetambara Jainism is itself further divided over whether temple worship of images is legitimate.

The majority Murtipujaka ("image-worshipping") Svetambaras maintain elaborate temple worship of Tirthankara images, while the Sthanakvasi sect, arising in the seventeenth century, and the Terapanth, a further eighteenth-century reform breakaway founded by Acharya Bhikshu, reject image worship entirely as a later corruption unsupported by the earliest scripture, gathering instead in plain meeting halls (sthanaks) without images for prayer and teaching. This iconoclastic reform movement, distinct from and later than the original Digambara-Svetambara split, shows that the white-clad tradition is not itself doctrinally uniform beyond its shared position on monastic clothing and women's liberation.

The wearing of white robes is the Svetambara counterpart to the Digambara ideal of nudity, and the disagreement over clothing is one of the two central issues, the other concerning women and liberation, that separated the Jain community into its two enduring branches. For the Svetambara the point is that renunciation lies in detachment of the heart rather than in the literal shedding of every possession, a stance that connects directly to their affirmation that women, robed like the monks, can attain liberation.

Svetambara ascetic discipline extends the principle of non-harm to minute, invisible life: many Svetambara monks and nuns, Sthanakvasi and Terapanthi ascetics especially, wear a cloth square, the muhpatti, across the mouth at all times or during speech, to avoid inadvertently inhaling and killing microorganisms in the air, and all carry a soft whisk, the rajoharana, to sweep the ground or a seat gently before sitting, clearing away insects that might otherwise be crushed. These everyday practices make Svetambara ahimsa a matter of continuous, minute bodily vigilance, a discipline shared in modified form with Digambara monastics, whose equivalent whisk is traditionally made of peacock feathers rather than wool or cotton strands.