Jain Journal 1971 01

SR No.: 520021
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication
Publication Year: 1971
Total Pages: 54
Language: English
Classification: Magazine, India_Jain Journal, & India
File Size: 3 MB

Page 9

JANUARY, 1971
established that this civilisation had spread on all sides very far beyond the Indus Valley), we do not yet know enough beyond that they worshipped figurines of the Mother Goddess and other deities, benign as well as malign, in their homes. Much doubt has recently been cast by historians on the earlier assumption that they were phallus worshippers; what had hitherto been regarded as being phallic symbols, are now supposed to have been architectural pieces, to serve purposes yet unascertained. Whether there was worship of any over-all deity in any central shrine, a temple as in Egypt or a Ziggurat as in Sumer and Babylon, is not yet known. The so-called "Citadel" in Mahenjodaro, yet unexcavated because of the presence of the ruins of an ancient Buddhist Stupa on the topmost stratum, may in fact have been neither a military structure as its present nomenclature presumed nor a royal building of some sort, but some kind of an edifice of great religious significance, perhaps of supreme importance to the population, as may be surmised from the presence of the Buddhist shrine on the site, built in historical times, because in India it is traditional and customary to build nothing but a religious shrine on the ruins of an older shrine (compare the Great Stupa of Nalanda which has seven layers of reconstruction) or in other words, never to build a sacred structure on the ruins of a secular one and never to build a secular structure on the ruins of a sacred one; so the principle was, as it were, sacred on sacred, secular on secular (monastery No. 1 at Nalanda was rebuilt nine times, each time on the ruins of the previous structure), and never vice versa, from which we infer that the "Citadel" was a religious edifice, the memory whereof lingered on even till early historical times culminating in the building of the Buddhist shrine on its ruins. Comparable in this connection is also the fact that a cremation ground in India always remains as such, i.e., wherever we find a fairly old cremation ground, we may conclude that it was the same ever since the locality came to be inhabited; therefore the cremation ground on the eastern bank of the stream north of Maniyar Math at Rajgir, where dead bodies are brought from all the surrounding countryside today, may be presumed to have been the cremation ground of Rajgir even in the days of king Bimbisara (Seniya, Srenika of Jaina literature), from where Buddha collected rags for making his wearing apparel.
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But although we do not know much yet about the institutional religion of the Indus Valley people, we know that bathing and washing was a ritual with them as inferred from the Great Bath of Mahenjodaro and the elaborate arrangement of bath-rooms and drainage in the residential buildings. Bathing or washing ceremonially before undertaking any important work, offering prayer and pūjā, etc., were probably as