TEXTS ON WOMEN’S INTELLIGENCE AND POSITION
PART 2 – ARE WOMEN LESS INTELLIGENT? – READING SRILA PRABHUPADA ON WOMEN
While reading the story of Yaksha prashna in the Vana Parva Chapter 313, verse 44 and 45, one has to observe what is said by Dharmaraja Yudhistira who is considered as the most righteous and the very representation of Dharma and most fit to be the King. In this episode, Lord Yama Himself, disguised as a mystical Yaksha, tests Yudhistira’s wisdom and righteousness by asking him a series of deeply philosophical and worldly questions.
In text 44, the Yaksha asks,
kiṃ svinmitraṃ pravasato kiṃ svinmitraṃ gṛhe sataḥ
āturasya ca kiṃ mitraṃ kiṃ svinmitraṃ mariṣyataḥ
And Yushistira’s answer is
sārthaḥ pravasato mitraṃ bhāryā mitraṃ gṛhe sataḥ
āturasya bhiṣaṅ mitraṃ dānaṃ mitraṃ mariṣyataḥ
A wife is a best friend of a householder and that is how she must be considered and treated, notwithstanding her voluntary acceptance of a humble position. Submission cannot be yanked out of any jiva; the Supreme Lord Krishna Himself doesn’t do it even if He has both the right and the capacity to do it. In today’s age companding someone into submission by calling them inferior, or less intelligent will only backfire and do injustice to the social order by pushing away more souls from God consciousness.
Vedas remember a woman as ṛṣika too!
Ṛg Veda 10.125, the celebrated Vāk or Devī Sūkta, is traditionally attributed to Vāk Ambhṛṇī, a female seer. The hymn speaks with extraordinary philosophical power. Vāk identifies herself with cosmic speech, sovereignty, knowledge and the power through which the gods themselves operate. Traditional attribution recognises Vāk Ambhṛṇī as the seer of the hymn.
Again, one may call her exceptional. That is fine! But a female ṛṣi in the Vedic corpus itself makes one proposition impossible to sustain literally:
that female embodiment intrinsically prevents access to profound Vedic cognition.
This argument is not valid..
The Paradox called Canakya Pandita
I will present the whole breakdown of Canakya Pandita whose works are quoted many times to justify women’s inferior or ‘toxic’ (visha kanya) nature, in a separate exclusive article.
Srila Prabhupada sometimes quoted Canakya regarding women. In a 1973 lecture he cited the aphorism: “Don’t trust women.” He then distinguished ordinary women from women transformed through Krishna consciousness. The text commonly circulated as Canakya Niti contains several severe generalizations. One verse lists mūrkhatvam, foolishness, among traits attributed to women. Another famously says women possess twice the hunger, four times the modesty, six times the courage and eight times the sexual desire of men.
That second verse should make us pause. Are we supposed to read “six times the courage” as a literal measured psychological constant? Obviously this is niti rhetoric, compressed social observation expressed through a memorable aphorism.
This means the genre of the niti shastra matters. It is not a Vedic text. It is not even a dharma shastra. It is not a psychometric manual nor an upanishad with knowledge of the jiva and paramatma. It is nowhere near Lord Krishna’s definition of bhakti or nature of the soul. It is at the most, a worldly maxim concerning prudence, sexuality, politics or household conduct that cannot or should not be automatically elevated to the level of eternal truth.
And if we insist on literalizing every Canakya generalisation, then that consistency would require treating “women possess six times the courage of men” with exactly the same literal force as “women possess foolishness.” How ironical. Not to mention his very progressive work and instructions for women’s rights in the artha shastra (in the next aarticle)
Fidelity of reference is important…not cherry-picking. More on these paradoxes in Canakya’s works soon
How to understand Manu-smṛti on Women
Another foundational quotation often used from the Manu smriti 9.3:
pitā rakṣati kaumāre
bhartā rakṣati yauvane
rakṣanti sthavire putrā
na strī svātantryam arhati
The traditional translation says that a father protects her in childhood, her husband in youth, and her sons in old age, and that a woman is not to live independently within that social-legal framework. Medhātithi’s commentary understands rakṣati in terms of guarding her from harm and places responsibility upon male relatives.
Traditionally, this model may be agreeable. But we must dispute its warped applicability today. It is very easy to misinterpret the word svatantrya. The word itself is not something that leads us to conclude that therefore women possess lower IQ.
Let us understand this verse and its application – it is a social prescription concerning guardianship and duty. Turning it into proof of cognitive inferiority inserts a premise that is not in the verse. But Manu also says: “Where women are honoured, there the gods rejoice” and declares that the rites fruitless where women are not honoured. There are verses that say, families in which women grieve decline, while those in which they do not grieve prosper. There is no way to create a family that is happy where women are forced to accept their apparent less intelligent position and not understood as a soul which is also yearning to return home. Unless the society creates a structure where women are coopted and cooperated with, this gender battle will only get worse as this age progresses.
Dharmashastras are not eternal Vedic truth about the Soul
Unfortunately, this distinction is lost. Dharmashstra concerns embodied social life and are time bound. The Lord’s words in the Gita for example, is the fundamental ontology concerning an eternal truth – the living entity is not the body.
Once this hierarchy is forgotten, time-based social prescriptions can quietly become metaphysics. Manu smriti itself is not applicable for the age of kali; we have the parashara smriti. Where there is absolutely no intelligence left in the human race save the mercy of the Holy names, to use texts that do not have relevance, make people go further away from bhakti. These smritis which are proven to be heavily edited and tampered with have been weaponized by every school of philosophy in some avatar to degrade women, sudras etc. And see how the textx acquired a different meaning altogether with time:
“Women were assigned a dependent social role” turns into women are intrinsically dependent beings.
“Women were restricted from particular Vedic rites” turns into women cannot understand transcendental philosophy.
“Women were instructed to receive protection” turns into a woman’s judgement is inherently inferior to a man’s judgement.
None of those transitions is automatic. They have to be argued and justified and used time and again and has turned families into battlegrounds.
Here is something we seem to have completely forgotten: Lord Krishna repeatedly supplies principles and proof that debunk and resist this precise reduction and representation. If we only have the eyes to see it! And the ears to hear it!
The Gita & Bhagavatam verses we forget/misinterpret often
Srila Narada Muni says in Srimad-Bhagavatam 7.11.35 that if the characteristics of a particular varna appear in someone born elsewhere, the person should be recognized according to the characteristics actually manifested, not merely according to birth. Lord Krishna says about the four varnas that they are based on guna and karma (BG 4.13). Srila Prabhupada also explicitly emphasises that birth alone is insufficient to determine the characteristics of a person.
This verse concerns varna, not gender. We should not pretend otherwise. But it establishes an important Vaishnava mandatory habit that we MUST acquire and practise as well – look at lakshana. Look at the qualities actually present in the person. If we refuse to conclude that a man is a brahmana merely because he was born into a brahmaṇa family, why would we conclude that an individual woman has inferior intelligence as a rule?
Also, to reiterate, Lord Krishna did not call women papa yonayah (BG .32) and no, it does not refer to women. Srila Madhvacharya, Srila Ramanujacharya, and even Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura says papa yonayah refer to a specific class of jivas who have committed very sinful activities. It is only in Sri Shakaracharya’s works that you find equation of papa yonayah with women.
A woman’s body is difficult – not sinful or representation of inferiority.
“Two-legged animal” does not mean “woman”
The story of Indra’s brahma hatya dosha being distributed among 4 beings – earth, trees, the froth in water, and women – is frequently invoked to point towards how a woman is lusty and how she brings down a man with her ‘maya’. Or she herself is the representation of ‘maya’. The word used to describe the boon given by Indra to women for acceptng a share of his sin is that they are blessed with shasvata kama. This is very wrongly and casually rendered as “permanent or insatiable female lust.” The older Vedic parallel in the Taittirīya Saṁhitā explains the boon more concretely as fertility following menstruation and the continuation of sexual relations until childbirth. The point is therefore about reproductive and sexual capacity. It does not state that women possess an uncontrollable appetite or that female embodiment obstructs spiritual realization.Srila Prabhupada’s assertion that women as a class are perpetually unsatisfied in lust is a stronger psychological interpretation in the purport, not the literal content of the verse.
There are many devotees in ISKCON who refer to women as the two-legged animal who has to be retrained and controlled. This deserves its own correction because the expression is sometimes thrown around recklessly. The Sanskrit expression dvipāda-paśu, two-legged animal, is used by Srila Prabhupada for a human being devoid of spiritual understanding.
That category is not automatically a female. It is existential. A male scientist with no understanding of the soul can qualify as a two-legged animal too. So can a professor, or even a king
So when someone uses “two-legged animal” specifically to characterise female intelligence, he is not defending Srila Prabhupada.
He is misapplying Srila Prabhupada’s own category. We do not need more controversies than we already have.
Last but not the least – The Material Scientific Realm
Science belongs here because Srila Prabhupada himself invoked psychology and brain anatomy.
His words were essentially: men have much larger brains → therefore men are more intelligent.
Modern neuroscience agrees with the first proposition only in a broad anatomical sense. Male and female brains do show average differences in overall size and in the volume of particular regions. The National Institutes of Health has documented reproducible sex-related anatomical differences while explicitly noting that the behavioural and cognitive significance of many of them remains unresolved.
The second proposition does not follow neatly. Research shows that men and women may use somewhat different neural architectures to achieve similar cognitive performance. The intelligence literature is also more nuanced than either side sometimes admits.
A 2022 review by Dr. Matthew Reynolds and colleagues from University of Kansas concluded that there is no reliable or meaningful average sex difference in general intelligence, although there are average differences in particular abilities. Women show advantages in areas such as processing speed and writing, while men show advantages in some visual-spatial abilities. Also, a 2022 meta-analysis involving more than 46,000 school-aged participants found only a negligible overall male Full-Scale IQ advantage, about1.4 IQ points, which became statistically non-significant with newer testing batteries.
That debate should be reported honestly. But notice what none of these contemporary findings resembles: women possess approximately half the useful brain substance of men and are therefore categorically less intelligent.
That old explanatory model simply does not survive. More importantly, even a small statistical difference between population means could never justify treating an individual woman’s intelligence as known merely because she is female.
The shastras already taught us to look at lakṣaṇa. Science arrives at a surprisingly compatible practical warning.
CONCLUDING PART 3 AHEAD
