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HISTORY OF JAINA MONACHISM
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stocks of pigs were kept, wool was sold and the sales of fish also brought a good income to the nuns....... Another practice revealed by these old accounts was that of people coming to halt at the convent for the celebration of some of the greater feasts......These visitors eventually made an offering for the hospitality shown them.
"The spiritual needs of the community were ministered to by a chaplain....... It is not uninteresting to notice that the nuns' little present for the services of these reverend gentlemen was, it would seem, delicately handed to them in purses purchased for the purpose.
"These ladies were excellent needlewomen (and they sold their finished. articles)........They grew the wool and spun it and wove it into cloth, not only for their own garments, but also for those of their retainers.
"All the larger nunneries and probably most of the smaller ones, to whatever Order they belonged, opened their doors for the education of young girls, who were frequently boarders. In fact the female position of the population, the poor as well as the rich, had in the convents their only schools, nuns their only teachers, in pre-Reformation times. Not only were many of the nuns of good birth, but their pupils were in the main drawn from the same class."
The above picture of nun-life, though far removed in point of time, if compared with the life of early Jaina and Buddhist nuns, presents an altogether different atmosphere. Even though corporate or rather group life seems to some extent common to both, yet the feature of Christian nun-life involved living as a self-supporting and compact unit carrying on all the necessary activities for the maintenance of their group besides the purely spiritual ones, is lacking in the life of nuns in India. The latter were found begging their food and clothing, unlike their Christian sisters. It, therefore, presents quite a different picture far removed from the Indian monastic life, and the nuns, at least, never played a role of school teachers even though they were preachers to the public.
Evaluation of the Order of Nuns:
The study of the order of the Jaina nuns and its comparison with similar orders in other religions brings out certain peculiarities of their nun-order.
From the attitude towards woman in general and their subordinate position in the Church as a whole, it seems that the Jaina nuns failed to play any major role either in the administration or in the execution of the powers of the Church as embodied in the figure of an äcārya. They were satisfied to remain in the background doing their best for spiritual advance
ment.
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