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110 Harmless Souls by-passing the karmic world altogether through the realisation of its irrelevance, or even its unreality, in terms of the essential self. In the light of orthodox Jaina doctrine such a position - although perhaps logical given the premises on which the doctrine is founded - is, to say the least, startling, and will require considerable comment once the evidence has been considered.
To return to the present argument, we have seen that upayoga is the term used to designate 'application of consciousness', and that this is considered the defining characteristic of the jīva. However, so far upayoga has not been - and is not in standard expositions of Jaina doctrine which follow the Tattvārtha Sūtra (including most secondary sources in Western languages) - directly designated as the instrument by which the soul causes itself to be bound. Given that Umāsvāti in the Tattvārtha Sūtra identifies kaṣāyas (passions) as the efficient cause of bondage through karma, and that kaşāyas need some kind of initial consciousness to engender them, then it might be inferred from the doctrines of the Tattvārtha Sūtra that ultimately upayoga is 'responsible for bondage.66 This is still some way from saying that it is the quality of consciousness alone which is directly instrumental on every count in binding and freeing individual jivas. This in turn is equivalent to saying that the soul is totally responsible for and in control of its own bondage or freedom, given that upayoga is the characteristic of jīvas. To say so is not to maintain that particular states of consciousness cannot be, and are not, accounted for in terms of greater or lesser degrees of karmic obstruction, but that the cause of that obstruction comes to be seen in terms of the new central 'metaphor', i.e. consciousness itself, rather than in terms of particular physical activities and their consequences. And when pure consciousness is identified with an 'original',
66 Umāsvāti himself does not link the two, although the connection is evident from, for example, the way in which bhāva is used in the same context in the Pañcāstikāya (see above).
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