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94 : Śramaņa, Vol 62, No. 1 January-March 2011
knowledge and experience of conduct available to us in the practical world are all essential tools to apprehending the Ultimate. Although he clearly qualifies the vyavahāra-naya as a less complete perspective, while niscaya-naya is a total perspective, he allows the two to exist as valid complimentary perspectives:
The pure standpoint which reveals the pure substance should be adopted by (those whose object is to be) the seers of the supreme state of the soul; but the practical one by those who are satisfied with a lower status. 34 This dialectic initially looks like it will provide space between the conceptual ideal of the Self and the practical experience of the Self, much like the way an abstract inductive hypothesis is tested by concrete, empirical means. The niscaya Self acts as a possibility space, what Kundakunda calls “the unitary substratum”35 or ideal that interfaces with the empirical world of vyavahāra, so that knowledge of both leads to collaborative growth.
But this dialectic does not last long as Kundakunda quickly places vyavahāra, not only on a more inferior level than niścaya, with some interplay between the two ways of knowing, but ultimately discards vyavahāra as a valid way of knowing altogether. As Shaha points outs, “By vyavahāra-naya, Kundakunda means: the differential, the particular, the impure, the modal, the accidental, the unreal, the non-existing, the formal, the pervert, the gross, and the discardable aspect of reality. It simply diagnoses the unhealthy, unnatural, despicable, diseased condition of the empirical self. It is the lowest rung of the ladder of the nayas.36 Not only does the vyavahāra standpoint have no insight to lend to the fullness of the niścaya standpoint, but it becomes a perspective to be discarded or exterminated in order that it may be replaced with pure knowledge that cannot be empirically tested, but must be trusted and believed.
He who, subjugating the senses, realizes that the self is of the nature of real knowledge is verily called a conqueror of the senses by the saints who know reality. 37 Sense perceptions are to be eradicated as
