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278 Harmless Souls meaningful and more compatible with the new context to take jñāna as the subject. Indeed, knowledge, which has just been equated with the knower (the self), is clearly too important to the overall significance of the text to revert here to being just another sub-category.
In this context, therefore, Samayasāra 404 states that knowledge - i.e. the knower, the self - is all these things, viz. right belief, restraint, the sūtras, dharma and adharma, and full renunciation. Consequently, to know or realise the self is to know - that is to say, be - all these things. In other words, (self-) knowledge is the whole of the religious life, the mokşa-mārga. Through a radical internalisation a single principle subsumes all the rest, and both the path and the goal are found within the self. Jñāna, which is selfrealisation or gnosis, supersedes all external discipline. (It is also interesting to note how this internalisation removes the problem of the pūrvas: that is to say, their loss is no longer a bar to liberation, since if you know your self you will necessarily 'know all the sūtras - jñāna contains them.) Liberation is thus a function of the autonomous self, i.e. of the cultivation or purification of the self through the development of greater and greater (self-) knowledge. And, as Chakravarti puts it, on perfection of knowledge the self 'becomes perfect and knowledge becomes completely co-extensive with reality'. The self is then both sarvajña and paramātma, the omniscient and absolute self.6
ii) Self-realisation We have seen that according to the Samayasāra the self (the knower) and knowledge are in essence one. This is, as it were, the omniscient perspective. But to attain this state, to become the pure self, it is necessary to realise, i.e. to experience, this theoretical truth in the self. In more abstract terms, a description of an ontological condition is both the end of and the means to a new epistemology, the full implementation of which leads back to that ontological
6 Chakravarti p. 233.
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