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Kundakunda: The Pravacanasāra
129
particular contact or touch, stickiness or dryness, be connected with material karman (karmapudgala) which has those qualities?
To see how Kundakunda (and Amṛtacandra) attempt to answer this question, we must look in detail at the gāthās following Pravacanaṣāra 2.81.10
At 2.82, we are told that although the jiva is without rūpa, etc. (as enumerated at 2.81), itself, nevertheless, it sees and knows (pecchadi jāṇādi) substances (dravya) which have rupa, etc., and that the mechanism of bondage is analagous to this. Thus the jiva, which consists of upayoga, having attained to various objects (of the senses), is infatuated, attached or averse, and so it is combined with them.11
The Tattvadipikā (on 2.83) explains that the atman, composed of upayoga, meeting with various distinct forms / objects, betakes itself (samupaiti; sam-upa- vi) to moha, rāga, or dveṣa. And because the innate nature of the atman (ātmasvabhāva) is 'coloured' (uparakta) by moha, etc., which are conditioned or modified by the 'other' (parapratyaya) (i.e. the ajīva, the 'various objects'), like a crystal gem whose nature is coloured by the objects close to it, so the atman becomes itself 'bondage' (bandha) because it is paired with their natures (tadbhāvadvitīyatvāt).
The gist of this seems to be that passions are generated in the atman by proximity to objects, that such passions are modifications of the upayoga which characterises the atman, and that this is what constitutes bondage. In other words, the ātman binds itself through its own upayoga.
On the one hand, this gāthā and its commentary seem to be harking back to earlier ideas about the soul being
10 Since there is a good deal of repetition in these verses, in what follows I shall rely more on summary than direct quotation; the relevant gāthās are Pravac. 2:81-2:97.
11 Pravac. 2:83. There is some ambiguity here over whether tehim refers to the sense-objects or to the passional states; Upadhye translates it as referring to the latter, although it amounts to the same thing.
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