Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī and the founding of the Bhikkhunī saṅgha
Buddhism and Jainism — the Śramaṇa traditions — emerged alongside the later Upaniṣads and rejected Vedic authority outright, turning instead to individual monastic renunciation. Both traditions argued, at length and without an easy consensus, over whether a woman's body was even capable of ultimate liberation.
The Buddha himself hesitated to admit women into the saṅgha, fearing — by the tradition's own account — that it would shorten the life of his teaching. His aunt Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī answered that hesitation directly: she walked to him with 500 women, on foot, until her feet bled, to demand entry. Persuaded by his disciple Ānanda, the Buddha relented, and acknowledged that women were fully capable of arhat-hood.
The Therīgāthā — the world's oldest literature by women
The result is the *Therīgāthā*, "Verses of the Elder Nuns," preserved in the Pāli Canon — the oldest surviving body of literature in the world attributed to women. Its voice is not devotional in a soft register; it is triumphant. The nun Muttā writes:
"Free, I am free. I am free from the three crooked things: the mortar, the pestle, and my crooked husband. I am free from birth and death."
The Digambara–Śvētāmbara debate over a woman's liberation
Jainism took the question of women's liberation to a formal doctrinal split. Severe asceticism sits at its centre, and the two major traditions divide sharply over what it demands of women.
The Digambara ("sky-clad") position holds that true renunciation requires complete nudity — and since that is socially unworkable for women, a woman must be reborn as a man before she can attain kevala jñāna, omniscience.
The Śvētāmbara ("white-clad") position rejects this outright: women can attain liberation in this very life. Their strongest textual case is Mallinātha, the nineteenth Tīrthaṅkara, whom Śvētāmbara tradition identifies explicitly as a woman. And whatever the doctrinal argument concludes, the lived numbers tell their own story: the Jain order has, through its history, maintained a far larger population of female ascetics (sādhvīs) than male monks.