MEDIEVAL JAINA GODDESS TRADITIONS

JOHN CORT

The place of goddesses and their worship is one of the many areas within the Jaina tradition that has been little studied. Most secon- dary sources on the Jainas hardly mention the Jaina goddesses. Padmanabh S. Jaini in his excellent The Jaina Path of Purification relegates the subject to just one footnote, in which he refers the reader only to James Burgess' 1903 article on Digambara iconography, ignoring the many more recent and more thorough articles.' Margaret Stevenson's The Heart of jainism, although based in large part on her observations of the Jainas in Gujarat where she lived for many years, doesn't mention the subject at all.2 More doctrinally oriented works such as Walther Schubring's The Doctrine of the Jainas also ignore the subject.3 Even scholars such as K. K. Handiqui4 and V.A. Sangave5 who do not ignore the subject discuss goddess worship as a "Hindu practice followed by Jainas," an approach hardly conducive to accurately understanding the place of goddess worship within Jainism. With a few exceptions, the secondary material on Jaina goddesses has been written by art historians, and has -been concerned with iconographical issues from an historical perspec- tive. The iconographical approach, as best exemplified in the many thorough studies by U. P. Shah, considers all the extant images of a particular deity and the relevant passages in medieval texts, maps the iconographic development of the deity, and goes no further. Questions of vital interest to an historian of religions-What were the distinctive features of the cult of a particular goddess? Who worshipped the goddesses? What were the worshippers' motiva- tions and expectations?-are not addressed in such an approach. This article draws on historical data to begin to answer such ques- tions ; a fuller answer will have to await field research in India. Goddess worship rose to a position of importance among the Jainas in the medieval period, in large part as the Jaina component of the devotional bhakti movements which dominated medieval 236

Indian religion, although there is evidence of some goddess worship from earlier levels of Jainism. P. B. Desai, and following him, Burton Stein, have argued that the Jaina goddess cults played a significant role in the popularity of Jainism in medieval South India.6 These Jaina goddess cults were not just Jaina incorporations of Hindu deities into lay Jaina devotional practices. The Jaina goddess cults were an integral part of both lay and monastic religious belief and practice, and the Jaina goddess traditions constitute a distinct strand within the complex history of goddess worship in India. Jaina cosmology distinguishes the various goddesses as residing in three realms, the upper (urdhvaloka), middle (tiryagloka), and lower (adholoka).' This three-realm scheme pervades Jaina cosmology. In the upper realm are two goddesses common to Hindus and Jainas, with clear Vedic heritages, Sarasvati and Laksmi. They are both clean, vegetarian goddesses, who are little different from their Hindu manifestations. In the middle realm are the Tantric aidyadeais, a group of 16 goddesses who did not develop differentiated personalities or individual cults. In the lower realm are the yaksi attendants of the 24 tlrthankaras. Most of these goddesses remain little more than a name and an iconographic form, but three-Ambika, Padmavati, and Jvalamalini-are the most important Jaina goddesses. Sarasvati, the goddess of learning, is mentioned in several early 8 Jaina texts, including some of the Svetambara canonical ?4?ay.? The antiquity of Sarasvati within the Jaina tradition is seen from an image from the Kaikali Tila at Mathura.9 The inscription on the pedestal of the image gives its date as the year 54 of the Kusana era, or 132 C. E., making it the oldest extant Sarasvati image of any tradition. This headless image is squatting in an unusual pose known as godohikasana, or the "cow-milking pose. " This is the same pose in which Mahavira attained his enlightenment. 10 The similarity of poses is significant in that Sarasvati presides over the sruta, or teachings, of the tïrthankaras, and thus is also known as Srutadevata. The early Jaina connection between Sarasvati and the Jaina teachings is further seen in that the Mathura image holds a text in her right hand. As Srutadevata she was worshipped as the embodiment of the sacred, eternal word of the tïrthankaras, and her