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APRIL 2017
PRABUDDH JEEVAN
65
among the family settings and supported in the group to which they belong by certain knowledge of scriptures and doctrine. It is the element of bhakti, i.e. faith; fidelity and veneration of Mahavira and daughterly submission to his teachings that make the sadhvis enter the samgha. The sangha became the shelter of destitute, homeless and widows since ancient times. Nuns are three times more in number than the monks and thus shoulder pivotal role in developing and spreading Jainism. These nuns are also known as nirgranthis, bhikshunis, sadhvis, aryas, anagaris, shramanis, yatinis, satis, mahasatis etc.
Majority of the Jaina nuns belong to the Svetambara community, including their reformist (i.e., non-idol- worshiping) sub-sects, namely, the Sthanakavasi and the Terapanthi. If the figure of six thousand for the modern-day community of nuns (for the entire Jaina community of only six million adherents) sounds staggering; consider the canonical claim that at the time of the death of Mahavira, his samgha consisted of fourteen thousand monks and thirty-six thousand nuns. If this belief is based on fact and there is no basis to doubt this since both sects agree with this figure), then even if the number of nuns has decreased since the time of Mahavira, their ratio to the munis has not changed significantly. The numerical superiority they have enjoyed through the ages must have contributed tremendously in shaping the Jaina community. Their impact is especially evident in their ability to promote the individual asceticism of the Jaina laywomen who routinely undertake severe dietary restrictions and long periods of fasting and chastity. No sociological research of any depth has been done on these women to tell us about their family backgrounds or their personal reasons for renouncing the household life.
It is noticeable that there was an increasing tendency for members of the same family to follow the path of asceticism. Every day the sadhvis not only sing the praises of Tirthankara but also names of 16 satis viz. Brahmi, Chandanbala, Damayanti, Draupadi, Kaushalya, Kunti, Mrugavati, Padmavati, Prabhavati, Pushpachula, Rajimati, Sita, Siva, Subhadra, Sulasa, Sundari. The recitation with deep faith of these holy names produces the same effect as a 'Mangal'.
Significant gains have been made, for example, by the relatively modern reformist Jaina sect known as the Terapantha (a subsect of the Sthanakavasi sect, founded in Marwad in 1760), which has five hundred
fully ordained nuns—more than three times the number of monks in that order. This sect has even introduced an organizational innovation of female novices called shramanis, currently under training to join the order of nuns. The number of such shramanis who have taken the vows of poverty and celibacy runs to the hundreds, and almost all are unmarried and well-educated women of the affluent Oswal community of Rajasthan. Enthusiasm to lead a religious life at so young an age is probably fostered by the self-esteem that the enhanced status of the nun in the family and in the Jaina community at large bolsters.
It is only among the Jainas that this question is the subject of prolonged and significant debate, a debate that, far from ever being resolved, remains enshrined in an irreducible sectarian schism. For the major sects of Jainism, the Digambara and the Svetambara, remain to this day deeply divided not only on the question of the propriety of a woman's taking up the monastic life but on a more fundamental question - that of the possibility of a person entering the state of spiritual liberation or nirvana immediately after a life in a female body. Nor is the question merely an intellectual one. For the Svetambaras not only believe that women can adopt the mendicant life as the path to spiritual advancement; they have put this belief into practice.
Indeed today, as in ancient times, Svetarnbara and -Sthanakavasi nuns (sadhvis) considerably outnumber their male counterparts (munis)? Even the Digambaras have a small number of "nuns" (a have a small number of "nuns" (aryikas and ksullikas), although, as we shall discuss further below, they are not accorded the same spiritual status as the munis.
The question, then, of the possibility of a woman's living the life of a renunciant, which the Jains believe is the only path to spiritual liberation, is not a purely theoretical one. On the contrary it is of the greatest significance to the two major communities of Jainism and indeed comes to dominate intersectarian discourse from at least the second century A.D. to the eighteenth century, the period spanned by the texts Jaini has collected and translated, and in fact pawn to the modern era. This dispute, as we shall see, continues to have significant ramifications beyond the surface level of its content, but of more immediate interest are the specific terms upon which the debate hinged.
The traditional literature of India, whether Vedic, Hindu. Buddhist, or Jaina, is filled, as noted above, with passages denigrating women and their moral, physical, and spiritual capacities. As early as the Rigveda itself
