Mahavira drew his followers mainly from the
Kshatriya aristocracy and organized them into a regular community with lay
and monastic members of both sexes. There is good reason to believe that
before they joined him some of these followers believed that all
possessions, including clothing, should be abandoned, in the pursuit of
passionless detachment, while others stopped short of making nudity a
requirement. It was this difference, and later disagreement about the
contents of the canon of the scriptures, which were to distinguish the two
major sects of Jainism. No fundamental doctrinal differences emerged,
even in later centuries.
