Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/75

II.] says, that "in a million it would be difficult to find one" who has the capacity for sell-restraint required by the Sahajiā preachers.

From the earliest times the Hindu society does not seem to have offered any refuge to fallen women. The dangers of admlttlng fallen women to a society wlth a severe ideal of female purity were fully realised by the Hindus. The rite of Satī, and an uncompromising form of widowhood, sprang up in our social organisation, as natural alternatives for women on the death of their husbands. The Buddhists reserved a place in their nunneries for fallen women and for those who took the vow of life-long maidenhood. The Buddhist Bhikṣus and Bhikṣunīes (monks and nuns) who probably started the principles of salvation by sexual love with all the noble intentions of Dona-Julia in Don Juan, fell victims to their own snares and rightly earned the contemptuous title of নেড়া নেড়ী—the shaved couple. This epithet is now applied to the fallen men and women of the Vaiṣṅava society. But the women of that class do not get their heads shaved as the Buddhist Bhikṣunīes used to do. The Buddhist monks and nuns who formed improper relationship were the persons who were first called নেড়া নেড়ী। The Vaiṣṅavas who borrowed the Sahajiā cult from the Buddhists were not spared these nicknames. Chaṅdīdās himself knew the dangers of the creed and perhaps he stood the severe test. But latterly it became debased to the extreme and produced disastrous results on the Vaiṣṅava community.