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INTRODUCTION
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Lord or the absolute Knower does not seize (accept) or release and does not evolve into anything else; but without exception he sees and knows everything all around” (PS 32).
While the Kanjipanthi have misused the concept of omniscience in support of their mistaken concept of non-doing/non-doership principle and determinism of sequence bound modifications (kramabaddha paryaya), etc., 93 Kundakunda categorically states: “From the external, other-referential (vyavahara) point of view, the omniscient Lord intuits and knows all [physical and non-physical objects, the self and other substances) (sarvajna); from the internal, self-referential (nishchaya) point of view, the omniscient necessarily intuits and knows his own self (atmajna).” (NS 159) This signifies that while the omniscient can have direct intuitive awareness, experience or knowledge of his own self, one cannot possibly have that direct experience or intuitive awareness in regard to other objects. His knowledge of all other objects in the universe is, therefore, considered by Kundakunda as a social or religious necessity from the vyavahara viewpoint.
“With Kundakunda,” A.N. Upadhye remarks, “sarvajnata (omniscience) is a dogma, a religious heritage and an essential part of the doctrine he represents,”-th the circumstances when different schools of thought have been struggling hard “to prove and establish the omniscience of their respective prophets, for on that depended the very life and death of their systems: it was the omniscience that could give infallibility to their prophets and therefore automatically to their scriptures that constituted the utterances of these prophets.” Sarvajnata (omniscience), Upadhye adds, thus, “came to be accepted and discussed only as a religious necessity.”94
The Exposition of Knowledge Speaking of the unique contribution” of Jainism, particularly Kundakunda in the field of epistemology and its “outstanding solution of the relation between the soul and its knowledge,” Hari Mohan Bhattacharya observes:
Jnana or knowledge is to (Jaina) in relation of identity, the essence of the soul. Kundakundacharya, who is perhaps the oldest of the Jaina epistemologists ani stands as a link between the canonical and later classical ways of thinking. remarks in his Pravachanasara (PS 35): jo janadi so
