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matter. As a matter of fact, Kundakunda's own treatment of ontological problems in Pañcastikaya and Pravacanasara took due note of this aspect of the situation; for in these texts what he was chiefly interested in offering was an account of the worldly souls and the inanimate surrounding in which they find themselves. Even Kundakunda's assertion that a soul is the chief cause of itself and an occasioning cause of karma while a karma is the chief cause of itself and an occasioning cause of a soul was not out of tune with the traditional teaching. For some sort of distinction between material cause and accessory cause is always legitimate to make even if there was no explicit tradition of doing so, and Kunda. kunda's chief cause and occasioning cause are virtual synonyms for material cause and accessory cause respectively. Nay, even the tradition of referring to sense-organs as something alien to a soul was slowly emerging. For that alone will explain why the Jaina theoreticians had begun to call sense-perception a paroksa type of cognition. Certainly, Kundakunda was not the first or only Jaina author to define the paroksa type of cognition as the type of cognition had through instruments alien to a soul (say, through sense-organs). It was only when Kundakunda, in Pravacanasara, came out with the thesis that a soul does nothing to karmic matter or to matter of the form of body, manas or speech that he sounded unorthodox. Apparently, the master Kundakunda was here going back on his own earlier view that a soul and a karma are each other's occasioning cause. In any case, a thesis like this constitute's Kundakunda's transition-point in his journey away from the traditional stand-point and towards the standpoint of Samayasara.
JAINA ONTOLOGY
(ii) Anekantavāda
are
In Samayasara too Kundakunda for once (vv. 86-90) repeated his old view that a soul and a karma are each other's occasioning cause. But here his emphasis was on the point that they are so only from the practhe tical standpoint whereas from definitive standpoint each of them is its own chief cause. For the rest the whole of this text is a talk of a standing harangue against all relationship between a soul and a matter. Towards the very beginning (v. 13) we told that the practical standpoint is the standpoint of untruth while definitive standpoint is the standpoint of truth so that even to concede that from the practical standpoint a soul and matter do enter into mutual relationship amounts to saying that they in fact do nothing of the sort. What Kunda. kunda does is simply to take up numerous positions that were traditionas to the ally maintained nature of a soul and deny them outright and jñāna are always emphasising, explicitly or otherwise, that darsana alone what characterise a soul. Thus he declares: "I am purely of the form of darsana and jñana, an entity ever incorporeal; even an iota of another
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