Medieval Jainism

SR No.: 011082
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Bhasker Anand Saletore
Publisher: Karnataka Publishing House
Total Pages: 448
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 27 MB

Page 172

WOMEN AS DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
157
of gold and jewels.1 We have seen that some women devotees have been compared to Attimabbe in their piety.
In A.D. 968 during the reign of the Răştrakūta king Kottigadeva, Nityavarsa, Paṇḍiga, born in the line of the Western Cälukya king Vikramaditya, was placed over the Kadambalige 1,000. His wife was Jakkisundari, who caused a basadi to be built in the famous Kākambāļ. For the temple thus erected, Pandiga granted the villages of Madalur and Malagavāḍi to the priest Ramacandra Bhaļāra, the disciple of Aṣṭopavāsa Bhalara alias the Kavali-gaṇa-ācārya.
Towards the end of the same century we have the example of a very austere Jaina lady. She was Pambabbe, the elder sister of Bhutuga (the Ganga king?) and the senior consort of Padiyara Dōrapayya. She was the disciple of Nāṇabbe-kanti who was herself the disciple of Abhinandi Panditadeva of the Desiya gana. Pambabbe having made her head bald (by plucking out the hair), performed penance for thirty years, and observing the five vows expired in A. D. 971. The scribe tells us that when the earth honoured her as Bhūtuga's elder sister, saying "Jīya! What are our commands?", she replied-"All that I have received is truely renounced as if never received! "3
But women also could actively promote the cause of the Jina dharma. Padmavatiyakka was the lay disciple of the priest Abhayacandra. On his death some time in A.D. 1078, she completed at a cost of seventy gadyāna the construction of the basadi which he had left half built, and erected an enclosure to the shrine of the god with a wooden
1. Rice, Karnataka Sabdānusāsanam, Intr., pp. 28-29; Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1883, pp. 301-2.
2. E. C. XI, Cd. 74, p. 16.
3. Ibid., VI, Kd. 1, p. 1.