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Jainism
although at the same time he is inclined to believe it to be a phase of the indigenous Aryan culture before the commencement of the sacrificial cult of the Vedas.1
The epoch making discovery of the prehistoric Indus Valley civilization of Mohenjodaro and Harrappa further sheds a new and significant light on the antiquity of Jainism. Sir John Marshal emphatically asserts that, "a comparison of the Indus and Vedic cultures shows incontestably that they were unrelated. The Vedic religion is normally ariconic. At Mohenjodaro and Harrappa iconism is everywhere apparent. In the houses of Mohenjodaro the firepit is conspicuously lacking”. At Mohenjodaro there "have been discovered many nude figures which “depict personages who are no other than Yogis”.3 And nudity has been one of the characteristics of the Jaina Šramaņas. Lord Rşabha himself went nude and his images are represented as such. Even in the Rk-Samhitā, there is a mention of the "wind girdled Bacbhanters-Munayaḥ Vātavasarāḥ”, who according to Dr. A. Weber, seem to be pone else but Jaina ascetics who “also appear to be referred to in the well known accounts of the Indian Gymnosophists of the time of Alexander the Great”.5
Now about these nude yogic figures of Mohenjodaro, it has been said that “These statutes clearly indicate that the people of the Indus Valley, in the Chalcolithic period not only practised yoga but worshipped the images of the
I The Original Home of Jainism - JA, XV, 2, p. 58. 2 Mohenjodaro, vol. I, p. 110-111. 3 Ibid p. 33-34.
4 Nudity of Jain Saints; Digambaratva and Digambara Muni.
$ History of Religions in India - IA-XXX, July 21901,
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