All lay and mendicant Jains are members of sects, which are the largest divisions within the Jain tradition. Monks and nuns are organised into mendicant or monastic orders. These form the largest grouping for mendicants. In Jainism there is no central authority equivalent to a pope, so a mendicant’s relationship with the leader of his or her mendicant order or subgroup – usually called an ācārya – is the most important one. These relationships between teacher and pupil produce a mendicant lineage or monastic order. Succession lists document these relationships and help establish the history and context of a mendicant order.
Members of most Śvetāmbara Mūrti-pūjak groups use the term gaccha for a sect. Within this sect there are smaller sects or subsects, which take gaccha as part of their title. Śvetāmbara Sthānaka-vāsin use sampradāya instead.
All monks and nuns live in small groups or communities. Because mendicants have a wandering life – vihāra – they travel in small bands, each with a leader, which are deliberately similar to large families. These leaders are subordinate to higher-ranking mendicants within the same monastic lineage or mendicant order.
The followers of the Jinas split over time and developed into two distinct sectarian traditions with individual histories at the beginning of the Common Era. Describing this process even-handedly is hard because Digambara mendicant orders have developed in a complicated way, still in need of scholarly exploration. Today Śvetāmbara mendicant orders appear fairly organised and structured. Although only the Śvetāmbara Terāpanthin sect has a single leader, other Śvetāmbara sects organise themselves around different leaders and subdivide into various subsects. Digambara mendicants also live in small communities but among the few full-fledged monks there is more emphasis on individualism. Both sects have a strict mendicant hierarchy based on length of monastic life although nuns are always junior to monks, regardless of mendicant rank.
In Mahāvīra’s time living in organised communities was not the only option. Another possibility was to live ‘like a Jina’, that is outside any group, living alone.
