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Kundakunda: The Pravacanasāra 221 crudely, although without significant distortion, if one takes care of the upayoga the yoga will take care of itself. This returns us to the question of why it should be thought necessary to continue with external practice at all, since the latter is only the reflection of an already-achieved internal state, and it is the internal state which is significant for one's personal liberation. Yet this very phenomenon - that the external reflects the internal - points towards an answer.
Pravacanasāra 3:5-6 deals with the linga, the characteristic mark, of the ascetic. In logic, a linga is 'the invariable mark which proves the existence of anything in an object';126 i.e. given this characteristic or characteristics, there can be no doubt about the nature of the thing examined. In this case we have to do with the linga which prove that somebody is a true ascetic and so on the route to liberation. The constituents of the external linga - nakedness, the pulling out of hair and beard, nonpossession, ahimsā, neglect of the body - are, once defined, clear enough and physically evident to anyone who knows what they are looking for. The constituents of the internal linga, however, are - from the very fact that they are internal, relying as they do on pure upayoga and attitude - not evident to observers; i.e. although they may provide an ideal towards which the individual strives, they are insusceptible to outside verification in themselves. And if they are not observable characteristics then, it may be asked, in what sense can they be linga?
The internal are, however, not totally unobservable, for, since external practice is said to reflect an already-achieved internal state, the external linga of ascetic behaviour imply the inevitable although invisible presence of the pre-defined internal linga. In other words, there is really only one linga (or set of linga) in the strict sense of the term, the external. From the presence or absence of that mark any observer can infer the presence or absence of internal states. And since it has been laid down that what really counts in terms
126 Monier-Williams, Sanskrit Dictionary.
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