Gender discrimination in Spirituality

I want to add a thought from Sri Aurobindo on this. In the devI-mAhAtmyam

there is a stuti called nArAyaNa-stuti. This is a stotra recited by the

divines in praise of the Mother Goddess. The relevant line is the

following:

vidyAs-samastAs-tava devi bhedAH striyAs-samastAs-sakalA jagatsu.

Meaning: All the arts and sciences, in fact all knowledge are only

different expressions of Your Light. All women in the universe are also

so.

Here the text allows a deeper perception which we owe to Aurobindo.

Pundits who have commented on this verse have stumbled on the apparent

repetition imbedded in the words: samastAs-sakalAH. The two words samastAh

and sakalAh both mean 'all'. Why was this repeated? The pundits say: the

second word sakalA (sakalAh is the plural of sakalA) has to be broken as

sa-kalA meaning, 'she who is endowed with the fine arts'. Thus it would

appear, the Mother Goddess finds expression, not in all the women of the

universe but only in those women who are endowed with a skill in fine

arts. Pundits were satisfied with this meaning and the community of women

also took it lying, as it were. Because this interpretation had the

sanction of the so-called tradition, apparently nobody even noticed the

implied insult to women as a whole. Another interpretation, again by the

pundits is also in vogue. This one is rather esoteric and involved some

knowledge of the kAma-SAstra. The word 'kalA' has a meaning in numerology

namely the number sixteen. It appears there are exactly sixteen esoteric

spots in the body of a woman. So a woman endowed with 'kalA' would mean a

woman who can respond to these sixteen spots, that is, a woman in the

child-bearing ages. Thus again, the meaning of the verse comes down to

saying that not all women but only a certain subset of all women have the

prerogative of being the expressions of Mother Goddess.

Sri Aurobindo would not to this discrimination between 'woman'

and 'woman'. He says: 'kalA' means 'part' or 'fraction'. So sa-kalA

should mean that all the parts are present or are represented. In other

words it means 'the fullest'. Thus the verse would mean: all forms of

knowledge are only different manifestations of Yourself, Oh Mother, but in

the universe the community of women are your fullest expressions!. This is

the reason for the worship of young girls as Divine Mother in the ritual

called 'suvAsinI pUjA'. It is this Indian genius of considering each

woman as the fullest expression of the Divine Mother that is missed by the

lay writer about India and Hinduism.

Prof.VK

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Prof. V. Krishnamurthy

You are invited to visit my latest book entitled GEMS FROM THE OCEAN OF HINDU

THOUGHT VISION AND PRACTICE at

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/2952/gohitvip/contents.html

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