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Harmless Souls
and physical karman, and so keep tapas as the primary means to liberation, otherwise the link with tradition is broken and the monk's discipline pointless. It is the logicians or scholastics, obliged to express themselves in broadly philosophical terms, who are confronted by the full force of this problem.50
Jaina doctrines and ascetic practices were originally formulated in the context of physicalist or materialist ideas, probably including the notion of a material or quasimaterial soul. Later, the soul is conceived of as fundamentally immaterial, but the means of bondage (karman) remains unambiguously material. The logical tensions which arise from this juxtaposition of the material and the non- material are stripped bare at times of dispute and philosophical 'system-building'. The scholastics have to retain the tradition, embodied in the practices of the ascetic, and at the same time provide a justification or doctrinal rationale for such behaviour. They also have to deal with the accumulated and accumulating rationalisation and internalisation of doctrine, derived ultimately from the contradiction between the material and immaterial at the heart of that teaching. Such a contradiction invites extreme solutions. But given prevailing Indian beliefs about the nature of the soul, and the inherent tendency of doctrines to become more rather than less sophisticated to move from ethics to metaphysics a return to the idea of a material soul was unlikely. In addition, there were other, perhaps more important reasons why the movement should have been towards greater and greater internalisation, since, at
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50 By logicians or scholastics I mean fifth century (?) writers such as Siddhasena and Samantabhadra (see JPP p. 83ff.) and those who followed them. For a list of such writers and summaries of their main works through to the seventeenth century, see Dixit 1971, pp. 88-164. Dixit characterises this period as the 'Age of Logic'. Undoubtedly, some of the works attributed to Kundakunda were at least compiled in this period (Dixit includes him in his list), but in terms of content they are far less orthodox, as Dixit himself points out when he refers to the Samayasāra (see pp. 93-94, 132-135).
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