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302 Harmless Souls embarrassing concession that it is possible, even necessary, to give up orthodox ascetic practices short of actual liberation. The purpose of the Samayasāra, however, is religious; and both here (Samayasāra 306 and 307) and in the concluding gāthās (408-415) the intention is clearly to engender an attitude of total non-attachment in the listener. Indeed, in the very last verse (415) it is stressed that those who understand and hold to the true meaning will, for those very reasons, attain the highest bliss. This implied devaluation of actual ascetic practice - from the highest perspective (the second niscaya view) it too is a hindrance to liberation - obviously has the potential to threaten that conduct which is the defining basis of Jajna religion. (In soteriological matters the inessential quickly becomes the irrelevant: what is no longer essential for liberation becomes a hindrance to be abandoned.)
It is little wonder, therefore, that the Samayasāra was at one time considered a text 'too sacred to be read by householders'.47 Upadhye states that 'the spiritual statements from Niscaya-naya may prove socially and ethically harmful to the house-holders who are almost absolutely lacking in spiritual discipline!.48 But it is also clear that, unless tempered by other instruction, such teachings must have also posed a threat to ascetic behaviour. The full extent of that threat perhaps only becomes apparent in such Apabhramsa works as Yogindu's Paramātmaprakāśa (c. 900 C.E.?), and research is clearly required in that field before the limits of Jaina orthodoxy can be accurately defined.
In the works attributed to Kundakunda, and in the Samayasāra in particular, a point of maximum tension is reached between soteriological theory and social necessity, between the inner state and the outer discipline, between ātman and linga. But by the time of Yogindu, the connection seems to have snapped for some, and orthodoxy
47 Upadhye p. xlvii. 48 Ibid.
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