Jain Journal 1982 10

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 31

Great Women in Jainism
1. Mothers and Daughters
It is difficult to exhaust the list of leading women recorded in the literature of the two principal Jaina sects--the Svetambara and the Digambara. Nor is it possible to give detailed accounts of even a few. Again, some of these may not have been real historical persons and seem to be more legendary figures; it is not possible here to enter into any critical historical discussion about them. But to pious Jaina women, these characters have supplied certain ideals, and as such they have lived through the ages in the forms of hundreds and thousands of Jaina lay women (trāvikās) who followed those ideals, but whose names are not recorded in literature or epigraphs.
Women are highly regarded in Jaina society, and it was prescribed that in emergencies such as floods, fire and robbery, women must be rescued first.1 From very early times, the Jainas paid the highest possible veneration to the parents of the twenty-four Tirthankaras, especially to their mothers, so much so that stone plaques (paṭṭas) showing the twentyfour mothers sitting with the infant Jinas on their laps were dialy worshipped in many a Jaina shrine. They are still worshipped in the Jaina temples at Abu, Girnar, Patan, Osia and other places2 and even in Jaina rituals of both the sects (such as the consecration ceremony of a Jina image), the mothers of the Tirthankaras receive due worship.3
Mahavira, the last Tirthankara (of this age), who lived in the sixth century B.C., was born of the Ksatriya princess Trisala, also known as Priyakarani. Later legends say that he was first conceived in the womb of a Brahmin lady, Devananda, but Indra arranged to transfer the embryo to the Ksatriya lady Trisala, which only shows the antagonism of heterodox Jainism to the ritualistic Brahmanical faith. It is indeed possible that Devananda was the actual mother, married to a Ksatriya prince, Siddhartha, and that she was also known as Trisala, or Priyakarani. It is only a probable explanation of the legend of the transfer of Mahavira's embryo. For in the Bhagavati-sütra a Jaina canonical text
1 Brhat-kalpa-bhasya, ed Muni Punyavijaya, Bhavanagar, 19338, Vol. IV., 4348 f. 2 U. P. Shah, 'Vardhamana-Vidya-pata', Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Vol. 9, 1941, p. 48 and pl. 4, figs. 3-4.
Cf. Vidhiprapa of Jinaprabha-suri, ed by Jinavijaya, Surat, 1941, p. 105; Pratisthasaroddhara of Ashadhara, Ch. 3, p. 56.
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