World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 192

Her remarkable archaeological interpretations, textual analysis, and the examination of ritual in a number of traditions within India is a refreshing contrast to a kind of glib Orientalist generalization based on limited historical contextualization.
In this particular paradigm of archeological analysis, prior to the tradition of servitude, it is possible that the ruling cosmological powers were femocentric and in harmony with the forces of nature both at a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. Goddesses presided, in the real and symbolic sense over birth, death, and childbirth but also over the natural elements and seasons. The loss of authority over civic processes went hand in hand with notions of female defilement. Thus the purity laws (niyogas) governing the regulation of personal and communal spaces of women gradually eroded the ambience of authority. Widowhood, menstruation, and childhood became scripted by laws which defined the limits of the possible. With a growing Sanskritization of life, the powers of governance passed in to brahmanic hands. The process of exclusion of women from the portals of formal education then resulted in a new brahmin male elite with coincided with an Aryan Sanskrit rule in contrast to earlier tribal based systems of apprenticeship. In the analysis of women writing against the grain by Tharu and Lalita, an account of the perseverance of subversive efforts by women to maintain representation in Jainism, Buddhist and even the more enlightened of Hindu traditions such as the Virashaivite sects, there was an erosion of speaking spaces for women as male academies of knowledge construction gained ground.
In the re-visioning of spaces, selves, bodies and nature, Rosemary Ruether is sensitive to the cultural complexity that led to the loss of a feminine theology. Although prehistory can only be reconstructed by the methods of knowledge construction, the re-visioning of a feminist theology can only arise out of a deconstruction of the recent past. Such analysis in relation to the construction of dogma and the exclusion of women's voices has recently come under increasing analysis. Rita Gross's analysis of egolessness and the misfortune of a female birth as it is expressed in various texts within Buddhism highlights this contradiction in contemporary Buddhism. Whereas sunayata (Void; Nothingness) may indeed be beyond gender analysis, gender inequity is still expressed in the life of the sangha (community). The Buddha dharma of compassion may indeed find expression in the community by the development of awareness and thought as to how this practiced by the women members. Feminine icons such as the Green Tara of Compassion are situated in a hierarchy of gods. This paradox is also given voice by Harper in relation to women in Jainism. An enlightened liberalism allowed for the entry of women into the monastic traditions of learning, healing and service. Thus venues of educational development, in contrast to Hinduism, were within the realm of the possible. True liberation, however, remained hitched to the misfortune of gender at birth.
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