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116 Harmless Souls
If the application of consciousness is auspicious the soul accumulates merit; or if inauspicious, demerit; when there is neither (śubha nor aśubha ) there is no accumulation.
Despite Amộtacandra's commentary and Upadhye's remarks to the contrary,73 upayoga as a technical term seems to apply here only to śubha and aśubha. Nothing is said about a condition totally free of karman; it is merely stated that in the absence of subha- and aśubha-upayoga there is no (further) accumulation. Nevertheless, it is quite natural to infer from this a kind of neutral or non-applied state of consciousness. And one may guess that when Jaina scholastics came to consider this doctrine of śubha- and aśubha-upayoga logically, they were led to posit a further category - śuddhopayoga - which was characteristic of developed śramaņas. Technically, it would seem that such a pure state of consciousness is not upayoga at all; i.e. it is not a manifestation or application of consciousness but pure consciousness itself, the parināmika bhāva (of Tattvārtha Sūtra 2.1) in which the jīva 'experiences' kevalajñāna. Thus, theoretically, it should make no difference to the behaviour of ascetics, since there is nothing additional which they must do in order to achieve it; i.e. they must continue as always to avoid the accumulation of new karman and to burn off the residue of 'old' karman. However, the fact that the instruments of bondage for lay people (śubha- and aśubha-upayoga) are seen as internal - states of consciousness rather than physical actions - means that any logical development of the doctrine will be in terms of 'internal' states rather than external behaviour. And this tendency was no doubt aided by the fact that, by the time it was developed logically, bondage for ascetics was already conceived of as predominantly the result of internal attitudes or 'passions' (as in the kaşāya doctrine,
73 Upadhye p. Ixxii.
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