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Kundakunda: The Samayasāra 305 least on the surface, this strategy provides the 'easier' or graded route to liberation, and, as we have seen, lowers the soteriological ladder into the territory of the laity. However, as has been made clear, to take this process to its logical conclusion threatens to disintegrate the tradition, and with it 'Jaina' identity. The scholastics, therefore, have to maintain the tension without falling into either camp (the real danger, of course, being from the kind of total internalisation, with its attendant 'dematerialisation of karman, which Kundakunda approaches in parts of the Samayasāra). Given this, I would suggest that a major reason for the peculiar content and form of what is technically considered to be 'Jaina philosophy' - syādvāda, anekāntavāda, and the (orthodox) naya doctrine - is precisely the need to retain a raison d' être for the ascetic practices which constitute Jaina identity in the face of a progressive tendency to rationalise and internalise doctrinal formulations.
In the works ascribed to Kundakunda, however, internalisation threatens at times to break the controls imposed by Jaina philosophy. If the 'orthodox' naya doctrine allows neo-Vedāntic teachings to be propagated (at one level) without precipitating a collapse into the vacuum created by the implications of a non-material soul doctrine, Kundakunda's heterodox reading of the niscaya-vyavahāra distinction in the Samayasāra) removes that philosophic restraint. By doing so it provides a glimpse of the full, 'heretical' implications for Jaina practice and doctrine of radical internalisation deriving from the conviction that the soul really has no connection with matter whatsoever. For the predominant view in Kundakunda is that what counts soteriologically is what happens internally, in consciousness. Instrumental in this are upayoga (in the Pravacanasāra) and bhāva (in the Samayasāra); stress thus falls on meditation (dhyāna) leading to realisation (jñāna) of the self's total separation from matter - indeed, the pure self is defined in both the Pravacanasāra and the Samayasāra as (such) knowledge - rather than on the
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