Food And Freedom

Author(s): Paul Dundas
Publisher: Paul Dundas

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172
Paul Dundas
SNT) describing the general nature of nourishment (āhāra). Śākațāyana (9th century), 7° the third polemicist, was a member of the Yāpanīya Sangha, a sect which flourished in the south for some time before finally disappearing in about the fourteenth century. The distinguishing feature of the Yāpanīyas is that, from the point of view of orthopraxy, they followed Digambara behaviour in rejecting the wearing of clothes by monks (although not in inhabited areas); doctrinally, however, they acccepted the Svetāmbara canon as well as Svetāmbara views on the salvation of women and the kevalin eating. Sakatāyana wrote two independent treatises (prakarana) on these last two topics: the Strīnirvāṇaprakarana and the Kevalibhuktiprakarana (=KBHP).72 All three of these writers represent their opponents as having a more elaborate position than that adumbrated by Akalanka and it is likely that the Digambara commentators on the TS presented no more than a skeletal outline of a much more complex thesis. Although the views of Abhayadeva, Silārika and Sākatāyana do not always overlap, the thrust of their arguments is identical and I have therefore created a composite Svetāmbara statement from their writings.
The Svetāmbara approach to the kevalin becomes more comprehensible if consideration is first given to the precise difference between the kevalin, the man who has attained enlightenment and the chadmastha (Ardhamāgadhi chaumattha) literally 'the man situated in bondage, covering' in other words the ordinary monk (also called asmadādi, 'a person like us') who is still subject to the effects of harming karma. All kevalins, tīrtharkaras or otherwise, have been chadmasthas, for Jainism holds that the path towards omniscience and ultimate liberation is a rigidly gradualistic one in which the individual who ha's entered into the correct way of looking at things (samyaktva) rises through various stages of spiritual development (gunasthāna) 73 until he reaches the thirteenth stage and becomes a kevalin-with-(mental and physical activity (sayogikevalin) which is essentially the same as the Hindu jīvanmukta.74 The fourteenth and final stage, that of the kevalin-without-(mental and physical) activity (ayogikevalin) lasts an extremely short time, immediately after which the soul becomes free of karma and body and rises to the top of the universe.75 Obviously, there must be a fundamental difference between the first twelve stages of, admittedly, gradually diminishing imperfection and the thirteenth stage of the kevalin and, from the canon onwards, we find these differences described in karmic, and therefore, epistemological terms. Quite simply, the chadmastha's knowledge is incomplete because of the continuing influence of the harming karmas and, therefore, the soul's full potential is not realised. No matter how far the chadmastha has cultivated higher forms of knowledge such as clairvoyance (avadhi), his attainments are insignificant in the light of kevala knowledge which completely transcends them;76 the kevalin, however, is completely beyond the operation of the human senses and is thus