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230 Harmless Souls
However, as we have seen, even within the Pravacanasāra itself there are indications of built-in checks to hold back any serious claim on the part of the laity to inner purity for themselves. Put simply, the only evidence of internal purity is external behaviour, and the latter is defined in śramaņic terms. We may speculate that, without this check, a fully internalised and laicised Jaina religious practice, based on what is essentially a pan-Indian meditational technique, would have been likely to prove critical for the cohesion and identity of the Jaina community. Moreover, without the continuing necessity of strict physical (i.e. external) ahimsā at some level - for whatever reason - there would have been nothing to guarantee the most obvious 'emblem' of Jaina religion or, we may suppose, to retard the tendency towards ethical decay.
I shall now turn to the Samayasāra, which provides a test case as to whether Kundakunda can, or even wants to, sustain this tenuous link with external practice in what is his least orthodox work.
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