The surviving textual streams of the Bhagavatī Sūtra are rooted almost entirely within the Śvetāmbara community, and they can be understood as a set of closely related yet distinguishable manuscript traditions. The most prominent among these is the Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka tradition of western India, preserved in scripts such as Jain Nāgarī, Devanāgarī, and related forms. Within this line, the text is transmitted as part of the established Śvetāmbara canon, with a relatively stable division into sections, even though minor differences in numbering and segmentation occur. This tradition is also marked by rich scholastic engagement, where marginal notes and layered commentaries accompany the base text and subtly shape its reception.

Alongside the Mūrtipūjaka stream stand the Sthānakavāsī and Terāpanthī recensions, which share the same basic Śvetāmbara textual heritage yet form distinct lines of transmission. These non-image-worshipping lineages transmit a text that is essentially the same in core content, while differing in details such as colophons, paratextual framing, and some minor readings. Their use of the Bhagavatī Sūtra often leans more heavily on oral exposition than on extensive written sub-commentaries, which gives these traditions a particular texture of interpretation without constituting a radically different recension. In this way, the text’s identity is preserved, even as its doctrinal nuances are filtered through differing communal sensibilities.

Within the broader Śvetāmbara world, there are also more localized sub-recensions, associated with groups such as the Kāṣṭhāsaṅgha and other regional lineages in areas like Rajasthan and Malwa. These manuscripts largely mirror the mainstream text but display variations in orthography, sandhi, and sometimes the ordering or grouping of sections. Brief narrative or doctrinal clarifications may be inserted or omitted, indicating a living tradition in which scribes and teachers subtly adjusted the presentation while maintaining the recognizable structure of the work. Such regional families remind the reader that a canonical text can be both stable and fluid, anchored in a shared core yet refracted through local habits of writing and teaching.

A further layer of tradition is constituted by the commentarial transmission: manuscripts that present the Bhagavatī Sūtra together with early cūrṇis and later Sanskrit or Old Gujarati ṭīkās. These do not form a separate sectarian recension, yet they function as a distinct textual environment in which variant readings, alternative word divisions, and explanatory glosses are preserved. Through these materials, one encounters not only the text but also its history of interpretation, as if hearing many generations of teachers speak around a single scriptural voice. Later printed editions, based on multiple Śvetāmbara manuscripts, have drawn on this complex heritage to establish de facto standard texts, which in turn now shape much modern study of the work.