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Śramaṇa, Vol 59, No. 4/October-December 2008
Mahaprajna, the present head of Terapantha Śvetambara sect, that "Kundakunda cannot be constrained or bound in the limits of niscayanaya, though many scholars have attempted to constrain him in that way"13 and the views of Muni Dhananjaya Kumar of that sect, which places the two viewpoints of niscaya-naya and vyavahara-naya in their proper perspective (his remark is quoted in full towards the end of this article).
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2. Dhaky holds that on the basis of the niscaya-naya, Kundakundācārya in theory views ātman or Self as separate from or independent of the association of pudgala or matter as was done in the Samkhya and Vedanta systems with the difference that ātman is not totally looked upon as totally inactive; Self does possess the faculty of knowing, intellection and creating as well as feeling emotive impulses within. Self is thus not a doer of deeds (kartā) and enjoyer of fruits (bhokta) although, from the standpoint of external and practical relations (vyavahara-naya), he may be regarded as a doer and enjoyer because of his emotional involvement, which leads to or colours his conscious thinking that way, this in fact being his habit to so orient since countless ages and for endless births. Now the ancient Jaina doctrine of atman as the karta and bhokta from niscayanaya and vyavahāra-naya has never been interpreted or understood that way by any Jaina scholiast till the pre-medieval times and that too not before the Kundakundacārya's doctrine was widely known."4
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The above statement of Dhaky is based on several misperceptions and misrepresentations: (a) he has not fully understood the significance and the real meaning of Kundakunda's ethico-spiritual standpoints particularly niscaya-naya and vyavahāra-naya; (b) Dhaky does not seem to distinguish between ätma (soul, i.e. life's inner spiritual conscious aspect or consciousness-as-such) and jīva (life's bio-energies living aspect, i.e. empirical, embodied self); though the two terms are quite often used interchangeably; (c) he forgets that in the very beginning of his most important work Samayasāra, Kundakunda categorically states that jīva exists or is located in the neuro-physiological processes or brain states (pudgala or physical karma), including body (Samayasara, 2), that the empirical, embodied
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