Jain Yug 1958

SR No.: 536282
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Sohanlal M Kothari, Jayantilal R Shah
Publisher: Jain Shwetambar Conference
Publication Year: 1958
Total Pages: 82
Language: Gujarati
Classification: Magazine, India_Jain Yug, & India
File Size: 8 MB

Page 70

TREATMENT OF GODDESSES
IN
JAINA AND BRAHMANICAL PICTORIAL ART
Dr. M. R. Majumdar, M.A., LL.B., Ph.D.
Generally speaking, figures of women are in the background in the Svetambara Jaina miniatures of the Gujarati school, as they naturally play a somewhat restricted part in the lives of the saints where they are of importance mainly as mothers of the Jainas; as in India, motherhood is at once a glory and a source of great power. Women appear also as goddesses, as dancers and as nuns, in Jaina literature as well as in Jaina sculpture and painting.
Coloured miniature representations of the glorified super-woman with double the number of human hands are met with in several palm-leaf and paper Mss. The palm-leaf Ms. dated Samvat 1218 (1162 A.D.) in the Jaina Bhandar at Chhāņi, four miles north of Baroda, giving miniatures of the sixteen Vidyadevis is unique, in as much as these are subsequently found to have been transferred to stone sculpture on the ceiling of the famous Vimalavasahi temple at Delwārā on Mt. Abu.
The Jainas are not averse to Sakti worship; however, they do not allow Sakti the place of principal reverence as Creative Energy of the world. The conception and imagery of the sixteen Śruta Devatās and the twenty-four Yakshinis of the Tirthankaras, disclose points of identity in respect of names, attributes etc. with those of the Brahmanical Nava-Durgās mentioned in the Devi-Mähätmya and other Sākta Purāņas.
Although atheistic, the Jaina and the
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Bauddha worshipped the Teacher and paid some regard to the Brahmanical divinities; for the atheistical systems admitted gods as demigods or dummy gods, and in point of fact became very superstitious. Yet both founder-worship and superstition are the growth of later generations than original practice.
"Their only real gods are their chiefs or Teachers whose idols are worshipped in the temples. Thus, like the Buddhist and some Hindu sects of mediaeval and modern times, they have given up God to worship man. Rather they have adopted an idolatry of men and worship womanhood; for they also revere the female energy." The atheism of the Jaina means denial of a divine creative Spirit.
The Jaina's hatred of women did not prevent his worshipping goddesses as the female energy like the later Hindu sects. The Jainas are divided in regard to the possibility of woman's salvation. Hemachandra Suri's Yoga Sastra alludes to woman as "the lamps that burn on the road that leads to the gate of hell". (ii, 87). The Digambaras do not admit women into the holy order, as do the Śvetämbaras.
The Jaina religion places some of the Hindu deities in a subordinate category (under Devas and not Devadhi-devas) and makes them waiting upon the Tirthankaras. In the image of Rsabha of the Gupta period, from the Kankali
1. Hopkins: "The Religion of India", p. 287-88 footnote (1896).