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Kundakunda: The Samayasāra 283 of a 'Jina-nature' nevertheless make liberation seem closer. They are affectively satisfying. (This, of course, still leaves room for the [heretical] suspicion that practice may not be quite so important as had previously been thought, given that in reality the self is even now liberated.) And one can continue to defer realisation of the inherently liberated and omniscient self alongside an increased hope of ultimately attaining the ideal religious goal.
iii) Discriminative knowledge Returning now to the concern of the ascetic or advanced layperson - i.e. the way to obtain or realise liberation in practice - it is useful to examine in more detail what is meant by discriminative knowledge.
Samayasāra 202 (not found in the JGM ed.) asks:
How can one, not knowing the self (ātman) and not knowing the non-self (anātman), not knowing the jiva and ajīva, be a rightbeliever (samyag-drsti)?
In other words, one cannot even get on to the first rung of the ladder to salvation without such knowledge;12 and yet such knowledge in itself constitutes liberation. This, however, is not an impenetrably vicious circle, as becomes clear if we draw an analogy with early Buddhism's sammā ditthi or 'Right Understanding'. For the Buddhist, Rahula tells us, 'Right Understanding is the understanding of things as they are ... [it] is the highest wisdom which sees the Ultimate Reality'. This understanding is, however, of two kinds:
What we generally call understanding is knowledge, an accumulated memory, an intellectual grasping of a subject according to given data. This is called 'knowing accordingly (anubodha). It is not very deep. Real deep understanding is called 'penetration' (pațivedha), seeing a thing in its trụe nature... This
12 See JPP p. 272 on samyag-drsţi as the fourth gunasthāna.
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