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216 Harmless Souls relationship is liberation and omniscience. For Kundakunda, an understanding of this is clearly the crucial component in his mechanism of liberation. He reiterates the relationship in a number of similar formulations. For instance,
The omniscient lord neither grasps nor releases nor transforms the other; he sees all around and knows everything completely, 111
and
The knower, who is beyond sense-perception, necessarily knows and sees the whole world neither entering into nor entered into by objects of knowledge, just as the eye sees the objects of sight. 112
The Samayasāra uses a different image to illustrate the relation of the knower (i.e. the self) and the object known (from the niscaya view), but with the same meaning:
Just as chalk does not become the other (i.e. the surface it is applied to) but remains chalk qua chalk, so the knower does not become the other i.e. the object known) but remains the knower qua knower. [Samayasāra 356 (= 385 J.L. Jaini's ed.)]113
And again, in a familiar image of the contactless, noncontaminating relation of self and not-self, the Pravacanasāra states that 'knowledge operates on objects just as a sapphire, resting on milk, pervades the whole of it with its lustre'. 114
111 Translation after Upadhye, p. 4, of Pravac. 1:32.
112 Upadhye's trans., p. 4, of Pravac. 1:29. Upadhye takes na pavittho nāvittho as Sk. na pravistaḥ na āvistaḥ, as against the commentators who take na avistaḥ (na apraviştah) - see fn. 2, p. 4.
113 Cf. Pravac. 1:28 and 1:29, above, where the objects of knowledge are compared to the objects of sight: they are within range of the knower / seer, but, crucially, there is no 'mutual inherence' (Upadhye's trans., p. 4, of nevaņnonnesu).
114 Upadhye's trans., p. 4, slightly altered, of Pravac. 1:30.
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