Jainism

Story hook

At sunrise on Magha Shukla Trayodashi (a chilly February morning), a Digambara monk steps onto the marble platform of Shravanabelagola in Karnataka. He is sky-clad — he owns nothing, not even cloth. He wields a picchi (peacock-feather broom) to gently sweep insects off his path. Around him, hundreds of thousands of devotees have gathered for the Mahamastakabhisheka — the ritual head-anointing of the 17.4 metre monolithic statue of Bahubali that towers above the hill. It is 981 CE, the year Chamundaraya commissioned this sculpture; it is also 2018, the year of the most recent twelve-yearly abhisheka. The continuity is the point.

Two hundred kilometres east, in an entirely different tableau, a Shvetambara monk — white-clad, walking barefoot from Gujarat to Karnataka on a vihara (foot pilgrimage) that he began six months ago — passes through a village. He carries a muhpatti (mouth-cloth) to avoid harming microorganisms in the air. He eats once a day. He will not, under any circumstance, drink unboiled water.

These two monks, both unmistakably Jain, embody a schism that began around 3rd century BCE at the council of Pataliputra and never healed. The split between Digambara ("sky-clad", south-leaning, naked monks) and Shvetambara ("white-clad", western-leaning, robed monks) is the central organisational fact of Jainism — and one of the most testable in UPSC.

Why this matters for UPSC

Jainism appears in Prelims almost every year as a single MCQ, typically a Tirthankara-symbol pairing or a council-location-date question. It crops up in Mains GS-I roughly once every three years either as a comparison with Buddhism or as a question on its contemporary ethical relevance (vegetarianism, ahimsa, ecology). Interview boards love it for the ahimsa angle and for the Bahubali / Walkeshwar / Palitana heritage hooks.