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232 Harmless Souls
rather than kind. The use to which the niscaya-vyavahāra doctrine is put in the Samayasära is, in a number of gāthās, far more explicitly radical than anywhere in the Pravacanasāra, and the implications for ethical conduct are consequently more serious. In fact the niscaya view is applied in two different and incompatible ways in the Samayasara.
The bifurcation of the niscaya doctrine is probably connected with the third significant difference between the two texts: the fact that the Samayasara is not only more obviously concerned with confronting and refuting other doctrinal positions, particularly Buddhist and Sāmkhya ideas, but is also more clearly influenced, both in its technical terminology and in its approach to particular problems, by non-Jaina doctrines. It also has a more persistent devotional strain than does the Pravacanasāra; of particular note is the conjunction of the (lay) vocabulary of bhakti with ascetic concentration on the self (in 'selfdevotion') as a means to liberation. (This was, perhaps, an attempt to reduce, through assimilation, the attraction of the Hindu bhakti cults for Jains.)
The relative eclecticism of the Samayasara thus indicates the probability that it was compiled from a number of sources, each of which had been subject to a variety of influences. It is not my purpose here to tease out all these threads (although this is an area in which more research could be fruitfully conducted); rather I intend to illustrate the ways in which the Samayasara represents a point of maximum tension between theoretical philosophy and the Jaina tradition of ascetic practice. I shall then consider how certain Jaina philosophical strategies - such as anekāntavāda (the doctrine of manifold aspects) and syādvāda (the doctrine of qualified assertion) - are used alongside Kundakunda's doctrine of 'two truths' in an attempt to hold together these two strands, the theoretical and the practical.
I shall begin with a general discussion of how the text
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