Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

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

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maintained at all costs, even if it resulted in banishing their wives and daughters from contact with them. Women, regardless of caste, became untouchables during the time of menses, enduring social stigmatization and isolation. In the early history of Brahmanism, the impurity and confinement were only for the time of actual bleeding, 38 but what once may have been a brief period of isolation eventually grew to have greater ramifications and women were unanimously relegated to the lowest status unfit for exposure to religious texts and rituals no matter if they issued blood or not. In India as elsewhere in the world, the more war-like and authoritarian a society became, the stronger was its menstrual taboos. Paranoid emphasis was placed on women's "corrupting and debilitating influence and men's need to over power, dominated and devalue her."39 Vedic concerns about menstrual taboos had influence in other socio-religious spheres; soon Buddhist and Jain male theologians concerned themselves with the taboos. 40
It is interesting to note here that both of the major heterodox, anti-Vedic religions, Jainism and Buddhism demonstrated similar, albeit less cruel, tendencies with regard to the position of spiritual and intellectual women. Although the female followers of Mahavira and Shakyamuni were allowed to become nuns and renounce earthly attachment, they, nonetheless, were regarded as being subservient to the male practitioner of the faiths. While both religions eschewed the Brahmanic caste system, at the same time they insisted that even the most elderly or spiritually advanced nuns were subservient to any and all monks regardless of age or station and, in doing so, they created a system of sex-based classes within their communities:
[Allthough Buddhist and Jaina thinkers are willing to reject the notion of a hierarchical social order, the power of the patriarchal doctrine of male supremacy in all matter proved harder for them to escape. Indeed,
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