Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Digambara
Summary
Digambara (dɪˈgʌmbərə; "sky-clad") is one of the two major schools of Jainism, the other being Śvētāmbara (white-clad). The Sanskrit word Digambara means "sky-clad", referring to their traditional monastic practice of neither possessing nor wearing any clothes.
Digambara and Śvētāmbara traditions have had historical differences ranging from their dress code, their temples and iconography, attitude towards female monastics, their legends, and the texts they consider as important.
Digambara monks cherish the virtue of non-attachment and non-possession of any material goods. Monks carry a community-owned picchi, which is a broom made of fallen peacock feathers for removing and thus saving the life of insects in their path or before they sit.
The Digambara literature can be traced only to the first millennium, with its oldest surviving sacred text being the mid-second century Ṣaṭkhaṅḍāgama "Scripture in Six Parts" of Dharasena (the Moodabidri manuscripts). One of the most important scholar-monks of the Digambara tradition was Kundakunda.
Digambara Jain communities are currently found mainly in most parts of North India in states like Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, parts of south Maharashtra and Karnataka. According to Jeffery D. Long, a scholar of Hindu and Jain studies, less than one fifth of all Jains in India have a Digambara heritage.
According to Heinrich Zimmer, the word Digambara is a combination of two Sanskrit words: dik (दिक्) (space, sky) and ambara (अम्बर) (garment), referring to those whose garments are of the element that fills the four quarters of space.
The Digambaras and Svetambaras disagree on how the Digambara subtradition started in Jainism. According to Digambaras, they are the original followers of Mahavira and Svetambaras branched off later in the time of Bhadrabahu when their forecasted twelve-year famine triggered their migration from central India. One group of Jain monks headed west and north towards Rajasthan, while the second group headed south towards Karnataka.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.