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250 Harmless Souls
'Rejection of all thought categories [concepts] and views [theories] is the rejection of the competence of reason to apprehend reality. The real [according to Madhyamika] is transcendent to thought'.35 'Samayasara' thus looks analogous to that state grasped by Nāgārjuna's prajñā and characterized by paramartha-satya, viz. the direct realisation of a higher, ineffable truth, beyond conceptual thought, which is synonymous with liberation. (It is, of course, only an analogy or, at most, a borrowed or shared technique applied to different material; Buddhist and Jain doctrines concerning the nature of 'self', 'not-self', what constitutes liberation, etc., are, it hardly needs to be said, quite different.)
Amṛtacandra highlights this resemblance in another work, the significantly entitled Puruṣārtha-siddhy-upāya. There he writes:
The niscaya mode (of statement) they describe as having a real referent; the vyavahāra mode as without a real referent. All mundane souls are mostly opposed to knowledge of the reality of things.(5) The great saints (muni) teach the mode without a real referent to wake up the sleepy, (6a) (but) who so understands only the vyavahāra mode, in him there is no teaching.(6b) As to a man who has not known a lion a toy is the only lion, so a man who knows not the real method takes the practical method itself for reality!(7) That disciple alone who understands both the real and the practical method, and takes a higher view equally distinct from both, obtains the full fruit of the teaching.(8)36
35 T.V. Murti, Central Philosophy of Buddhism, p. 208, quoted by Puligandla, ibid. fn. 101.
36 niscayam iha bhūtārtham vyavahāram varṇayanty
abhūtārtham |
bhūtārthabodhavimukhaḥ prāyaḥ sarvo 'pi samsāraḥ ||5|| abudhasya bodhanārtham muniśvarā deśayanty abhūtārtham | vyavahāram eva kevalam avaiti yas tasya deśanā nāsti ||6|| māṇavaka eva simho yatha bhavaty anavagitasimhasya | vyavahāra eva hi tathā niścayatām yāty aniścayajñasya ||7|| vyavaharaniscayau yaḥ prabudhya tattvena bhavati
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