Jinamanjari 2002 04 No 25

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

Page 13

womb. At that moment “she sat on the top of Mt. Himavat, reposing on a lotus in the lotus take, anointed with water from the strong and large trunks of the guardian elephants” (KS 36). The description is loaded with ancient fertility symbolism. The lotus, in Indian depictions, usually have cight petals (or a multiple of cight), a conformation that is found in the Indus Valley and goes back to the Ishtar rosette of Bronze Age Mesopotamia. It is signified in Sanskrit by the word padma, which also means "vagina," and is at root a symbol of the fertility power of the Neolithic goddess, though that meaning has been obscured in Indian tradition by the overlay of mentalistic allegory. The goddess, or in this case the mother of the tirthankara, sits on the lotus as Durga is presented seated on the lion -- as a sign of the type of power she exerts. The lake or pond is similarly a symbol of female fertility, read by Jungian analysts as a reference to the amniotic sac. The elephants are symbols of power in general and animal fertility in particular. The fact that this is the symbolic location of the tirthankara's mother on the night when she conceived closes the loop. The common Indian understanding of this icon as "the Gajalaksmi type, the goddess of wealth,” 18 seems partly a censored or euphemistic reading of fertility as simply equal to prosperity, and somewhat repressing the ancient sexual connotations of the icon.
As the tirthankara's mother is contextualized as a fertility or sexuality goddess, so the tirthankara himself presented with the trappings of an ancient fertility god. The tirthankara Mahavira, for example, is often presented seated in padmasana, hands in dhyani mudra (on top of one another, palm upward) on his lap, heraldically flanked by attendants with fly-whisks below and by hovering gandharvas, who fill something like the roles of putti, above. Like the nagas and y,akshas, the gandharvas seem to go back to an earlier age from which they have been revived with altered definition.
The tirthankara Parsvanatha is usually represented standing upright in kayotsarga, or dismissing-the-body posture, while seven cobra hoods rise above his head (sometimes the mounds of the cobra bodies rise on both sides in heraldic flanking positions). The serpent, probably because of the annual sloughing of its skin, which parallels and invokes the agricultural cycle, seems to have been a fertility symbol at least as early as the Chalcolithic period. In the earliest Sumerian strata serpent deities are found in family groups, the mother holding the young. This has something to do with the fact that in ancient Egypt the goddess Isis, like Parsvanatha and, in other icons, the Buddha, wears a halo of cobra hoods, of which the usual number is