Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

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was a prejudice that accelerated as the millennium passed and one that eventually resulted not only in the relative invisibility of women in the realm of spiritual matters, but in a widespread bias against permitting them minimal, if any, religious authority. There can be little doubt that their isolation was imposed and that there was, in fact, a steady decline in their religious status traceable from a time in India's pre-history when women may well have been the primary religious authority. Our purpose here is threefold: 1) to review recent theories on Harrapan religion that suggest women were the primary focus and probable authority in religious matters; 2) to consider the role of women in religious matters early in the first millennium B.C.E., and follow their increasingly diminished status as the millennium drew to a close; 3) to seek reasons for the spiritual disenfranchisement of women and their general invisibility in light of the textual accounts of the Jina Malli, the sole woman in any Indian religious tradition to attain the status of a pure enlightened being (tirthankara) equal to all other great realized teachers, including the other twentythree tirthankaras and Gautama Buddha.
Harappan Culture
The Harappans were a peaceful people; the fact that no weapons have ever been found in the excavations suggests that they lived in a world devoted to non-violence.2 Archaeological evidence shows as well that the Harappan cities were inhabited by a racially homogenous group. At all levels of the digs, "a biological continuity extending over some five millennia is demonstrable."3 Recent scholarship on the geographical origin of the Harappans traces them to the Neolithic culture of Southern Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Baluchistan.4 Studies of Harappan skeletal remains contradict theories linking them to a later influx of people from the Indian peninsula or the Aryan invaders. 5 We know now, also, that the Harappan
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