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282 Harmless Souls the overall trend of thought in this text, such qualifications seem little more than a holding operation in a pass which, in principle, has already been sold.
If the state of purity, of omniscience, is the eternal condition of the atman (i.e. in reality it cannot and can never have been associated with the impure, knowledgerestricting not-self), and the knowledge of this truth realises or brings it about in fact (i.e. engenders liberation), then this comes very close to saying that every individual is now and always has been a kevalin. In other words, there are the same kind of premises here which gave rise in Mahāyāna Buddhism to the tathāgatagarbha or 'BuddhaNature' theory.11 For, in the Jain case, there is the barely concealed proposition that everyone has the Jina- or kevalin-nature (i.e. each person's ātman is really omniscient), and that knowledge of this realises it ontologically. Kundakunda, of course, does not go so far as to say that samsāra and nirvana are really the same thing; it is still assumed that with physical death the liberated ātman is released to a nirvāṇic place or condition. However, the logic of this physical liberation, which was tied to the material view of the universe (and perhaps originally to the idea of a material soul), is now very vague and, significantly, no attempt is made to explicate it. Emphasis now falls upon the state of liberation rather than upon its location. (Again, the concept of liberation as a state of pure consciousness or knowledge is reminiscent of Mahāyānist beliefs.)
One can only speculate on the effect of such ideas on the Jaina layperson, even supposing that they were disseminated to him. But it is clear that any changes must have been largely in terms of expectation rather than practice. That is to say, if the link with physical asceticism cannot be broken without risking the identity of the community as a whole, such theoretical possibilities as that
11 On the tathāgatagarbha, see, for instance, P. Williams 1989, pp. 96-115.
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