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Kundakunda: The Pravacanasāra 137 by the niścaya view: how can what is essentially pure transform itself into something impure? To say that at the same time it is and is not bound by material karman, depending on one's point of view, is to side-step the
question.
To be clear about this, the naya view is not the tautological one that, from the standpoint of the liberated jiva, there is no bondage by material karman, while, from that of the unliberated soul, there is. Rather, it is saying that at one and the same time the jīva is bound and not bound by karmapudgala, depending on one's point of view. This is in many ways a risky concession; to say that there is a viewpoint from which the jīva is unaffected by material karman, here and now in samsāra, even if the purpose of such a statement is primarily prescriptive and is not supposed to be a complete view, is to open a vista upon a potentially very different soteriological route. It is this path, as we shall see, that Kundakunda takes in the Samayasāra through his use of a vyavahāra / niścaya distinction which has more in common with Madhyamika Buddhism and even more with Advaita Vedānta than with the Jaina philosophy of Anekāntavāda. Here, we can come closer to understanding the origins of that departure by examining further the implicit tendency of this section of the Pravacanasāra on the mechanism of bondage.
As we have seen, the niscaya-naya is one attempt to break out of the logical impasse created by the material bondage of a non-material soul. It suggests that, at some level, the soul binds itself, which, if it is non-material, would seem to be the only intelligible explanation for the fact of bondage. (Although this, of course, raises other theoretical problems.) However, Jainism as a religion, as opposed to a philosophy, needs at the same time to keep the connection with material karman, which is the basis of all its ethical and ascetic practices. This connection is provided by the vyavahāra-naya. As an ungenerous opponent might remark, the naya doctrine seems like a Jaina attempt both to have their material karman and to
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