Jain Spirit 2003 03 No 14

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 40

NUNS COULD ATTAIN LIBERATION
was justified by the wish to avoid all objects and conditions of life that could endanger the vow of chastity. In the early centuries of Mahavir's order, there was a liberal attitude regarding co-educational teaching. Situations in which women were the disciples of monks and monks were the disciples of senior nuns have been recorded.
Unfortunately, the liberalism toward females that characterised the early centuries of Jainism was influenced by the pan-Indian prejudices against women. The first literary references to the final exclusion of women from places of authority date to the middle of the second century A.D., but they are the product of a branch that had taken place around 300 B.C. The Digambara Acharya Kundakunda in his work Sutraprabhrita openly declared women unfit for emancipation. Among other assertions, he stated that women have no purity of mind because of their menstrual flow, which was an anxietyprovoking liability. He avowed that total nudity was a requirement for liberation and because women must wear clothing they are exempt from attaining liberation. Such proclamations mark the culmination of a long period of struggle for those with reactionary attitudes who sought to limit the role of Jain women and discredit their spiritual aspirations or achievements.
Little is known of the woman who, according to the Shvetambaras, is reported to have been the nineteenth Tirthankara. Born into a ksatriya family, her father was Kumbha, King of Mithila (modern Bihar). Legend has it that she was so exceedingly beautiful that many kings sought her hand in marriage but her father refused all suitors. They in turn felt insulted and waged war on Kumbha. Horrified by the bloodshed, the princess Malli convinced her father to invite all the kings to the palace. When the warring kings entered the royal chambers, they were confronted not only by Malli, but by a golden life-like statue of the princess. Malli proceeded to open a lid on the statue's head to expose rotting garbage. She explained that like the sculpture, beneath her own exterior there was nothing but fouled and filthy matter. She then made a solemn vow to renounce all worldly pleasures in order to take up the life of an ascetic. It was at that moment that she became enlightened (kevalajnana). Her royal admirers, duly shamed and remorseful, realised that true happiness lay in meditation and the performance of austerities. They too, like Malli, renounced the world for a life of asceticism. The Digambaras claim that the nineteenth Tirthankara was not a woman, but a man named Mallinatha who lived out an ordinary career as a male Jain.
The Jina Malli was a central figure in later polemical debates between the Digambara and Shvetambara traditions. According to Shvetambara legend, in a former life Malli was a king named Mahabali. He undertook a vow of renunciation along with seven other Jain mendicants with the understanding that they would perform their ascetic practices as a group progressing at the same rate. The customary list of austerities included fasting. Jaini wrote: "Mahabali was by nature deceitful and constantly found excuses (such as ill health) to
skip meals and thus broke the agreement by deviously accumulating a larger number of fasts than his friends. His conduct was otherwise faultless, and as a consequence of his great exertions in leading a holy life he generated such karmic forces as would yield him rebirth as a would-beJina."
What is fascinating about the story is the thinly disguised assertion that one small conceit harboured by Mahabali, despite powerful motives and ascetic exertions, resulted in his enduring one last life as a woman. On the subject of Mahabali's ambitions to observe longer fasts, Nalini Balbir writes, "This had a double effect: it explained the rebirth as a woman (because the ascetic resorted to perfidy and lie) but also the destiny as a future Jain since asceticism is recorded among the twenty causes leading to Jinahood." Hence, Malli was the exception to the karmic rules of rebirth-that a Jain must not be female and that a woman is not endowed with samyaktva (the proper view of reality) at birth. It must be noted that Jains, regardless of the sect, believe that human vices such as cheating and deceit cause rebirth as a woman.
It cannot be determined if Malli was a purely mythological character or if she was an actual historical person, but there is every possibility that Malli was a real person or, at least, was a representative of the various women who reached kevalajnana. The story of Malli then became unique and a religious tradition has been recorded that female spirituality results in the state of bliss. The tale of her previous life as a religious, but slightly dubious, ascetic king was probably an attempt to obfuscate or diffuse any notions that females had spiritual powers. While Digambaras refuted the story of Malli altogether, Shvetambaras equivocated by explaining that becoming a Tirthankara for a woman was unusual, and hence it was described as one of the ten unexpected things.
The ambiguous positions concerning the stories of Malli and the debates on clothing can be viewed as attempts to obscure or deny a woman's powers, rights and authority, not just in religious matters but in all aspects of life. She was denied the opportunity to make her own choices. At the heart of the story of Malli's enlightenment is the remembrance of a time, perhaps dating to the pre-Vedic period, when the religious authority of women was unquestionable. The previous life-story of Malli as a dubious male ascetic was appended later in order to diffuse the impact of her spiritual success. The subtexts of the stories of Malli and the debates on women are clear. They are disguised attempts to destroy an older belief system focusing on the Great Goddess, in which the female ability to create life within her body was sacred and was the source of profound mystical power. 2
Katherine Anne Harper is a Professor at Loyola Marymount University, USA. The above article is extracted from Jinamanjari', Vol 13 No. 1, April 1996.
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