Jain Journal 2002 10

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 22

Jagdish Prasad Jain "Sadhak" : Jaina Perspective on Advaita Vedanta
89 tual activity which naturally presupposes the organic body. Even when the individual is looked upon as an agent carrying out injunctions,
igious and ethical, an organic body must be presupposed for carrying out all those injunctions. His conduct, as a social being in the world, is therefore inextricably mixed up with bodily behaviour, without which he can neither discharge his duties as a social being nor as a religious devotee. In this concrete world which is real in its own way, the social distinctions based upon rank and birth hold good. That one is a Brahmin and the other is a Ksatriya, one is a master and another is a servant, are all distinctions based upon the body and hold good only in the empirical world.
In this way the self appropriates the attributes and limitations of the not-self (as is evident in the judgement "I am Brahmin "I am fat and the like). But the identification of the self does not mean the total identification of being, because the self is intrinsically real, and its identification with the not-self only means that the self owns up the notself and vests it with its own existence. Thus in all cases of crror the substratum is real and the predicate is falsely superimposed upon it. "Correct knowledge necessarily demands complete escape from such an error. Otherwise, it is not possible to realise the truc nature of the Self which is the ultimate object of all philosophical and religious disciplinc."+
Therefore, Sarkara indicates the true nature of the Self which should be discriminated from the non-cetana bodily attributes as free from all wants and raised above all social distinction as Brahinin and Ksatriya and so on, and entirely transcended the empirical säisärika existnece to whom even Vedic injunctions will cease to be operative, because he is placed in a region from where he does not want to achieve anything more, because he is completely self-sufficicnt"
Kundakunda's study of the nature of the real Selfor Samayasāra, the sublimest spiritual work ever composed in Jainism, deals with all these points and practically adopts identically the same attitude. Sri Kundakunda begins his work with the distinction between the two perspectives vyavahārika and niscaya, empirical and transcendental. He describes the empirical world where the individual identifies hinself
3. A.Chakravarti in Samayasāra of Kundakunda (Varanasi: Bhārtiya Jnānapilha,
1971). p. 104. 4. Ibid., p. 103. 5. Ibid.. p. 105.