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244 Harmless Souls
separate is, of course, a matter of dogma and the premise upon which the argument is based, not part of it.)25
Dixit is closer to the significance of this gāthā [Samayasara 11-13] when he writes of the Samayasāra
that:
the whole of this text is a standing harangue against all talk of a relationship between a soul and a matter (sic.). Towards the very beginning (v.13) we are told that the practical standpoint is the standpoint of untruth while definitive standpoint is the standpoint of truth so that even to concede that from the practical standpoint a soul and matter do enter into mutual relationship amounts to saying that they in fact do nothing of the sort.26
The radical nature of this gāthā [11=13] thus lies in the fact that it states explicitly that the niscaya view is true because it expresses the way things really are, and the vyavahāra untrue because it is a false account of reality. The relativity of truth to viewpoint (syādvāda), based on the manifold (anekānta) nature of reality, seems to have been rejected here in favour of an absolute view of truth. In other words, Kundakunda looks like an ekantavādin here, with a doctrine of 'two truths' which bears a close resemblance to that used in other ekanta systems.
Gāthā 272 [=296 JGM] of the Samayasara is equally explicit:
Know that the vyavahāra view is contradicted by the niscaya view.
25 Here it is useful to bear in mind Matilal's words on 'two truths' in Vedanta and Buddhism, that 'an object can be said to be not real in two very different senses'. It can be non-existent or it can be devoid of the 'own-nature or svabhava that it is supposed to possess or that it professes to possess'. Thus, samsara is 'not a mere appearance, still less an illusion - it is something that is not quite successful in embodying an own-nature, svabhāva' (1986, p. 137). In the terms of the present discussion, it is the self viewed as related to non-self that is not real, because its essence is pure, inactive, isolated consciousness - it is a [self-] knower and nothing else - that is its svabhāva.
26 Dixit 1971, p. 134.
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