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Kundakunda: The Samayasāra 251
First there is the question of what it is the ignorant should understand (6a). Clearly, it is not merely the vyavahāra point of view, since in the second half-verse (6b) that is said not to constitute a teaching at all. Rather, it must be the fact that the vyavahāra mode is just a mode (i.e. that there is a higher view, the niscaya) which should be understood. Beyond this, however, both views must be discarded for a position which is neutral (madhyastha). In other words, the vyavahāra-niścaya distinction is itself simply a means (upāya) to approach the highest goal, a means which must itself be discarded in order to attain final liberation.
Such a view sits uneasily among the orthodox Jaina doctrines of syādvāda and anekāntavāda. For one cannot arrive at such a prescription by adhering to the syādvāda analysis.37 The vyavahāra-niścaya doctrine, however (in those cases where the niscaya view is said to be the truth rather than merely a different perspective), claims that the view that the self is not really bound leads to selfrealisation, a state in which there is no duality of knower and known, and so, by definition, no distinction of viewpoints. The difference between the two views (one congruent with anekāntavāda, the other not) is pointed up by a verse in another work attributed to Kundakunda, the Niyamasāra [159]:
From the conventional point of view the omniscient Lord knows and perceives everything; from the absolute [viewpoint] the omniscient knows and perceives [only] the self.38
madhyasthaḥ |
prāpnoti deśanāyāḥ sa eva phalam vikalam sisyah ||8|| Puruşartha-siddy-upaya, quoted and trans. (with my alterations) by J.L. Jaini 1940, pp. 107-108.
37 There is the idea in the fully developed syādvāda doctrine that the self is avaktavya, but this simply means that 'in some respect (the ontological situation of) the self is inexpressible' - see JPP pp. 95-96. 38 Quoted by P.S. Jaini, JPP p. 267, fn. 33; my translation.
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