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The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yaśovijaya Gaņi : 77
The Self
We have seen that Yaśovijaya first identifies certain moral and intellectual virtues as being quintessentially Jaina, and how he then argues that if non-Jaina systems understood the nature of their own practice more clearly, they would see that they too embed those virtues in their conception of the philosophical path. I have also noted that the embodiment of those virtues is thought of as a means to some further end. In a final step, Yaśovijaya argues that the equanimity which is the end of the Jaina path is consistent with the realization of that universal self, consisting of truth, bliss and consciousness, also spoken of in the Upanişads and the Gitā. In the first chapter of the Adhyātmopanişat-prakaraņa, Yaśovijaya tells us that there are two different perspectives on the self. From a strictly etymological perspective, it is the one who performs a variety of actions and activities. From the perspective of ordinary linguistic practice, however, it is the mind as endowed with virtuous qualities like friendliness." In the second chapter, however, Yaśovijaya describes the state of true self-awareness in decidedly Upanișadic terms, a state which is beyond deep sleep, beyond conceptualisation, and beyond linguistic representation, and he says that it is the duty of any good śāstra to point out the existence and possibility of such states of true self-awareness, for they cannot be discovered by reason or experience alone. How. then, should these two visions of the self be organised, the one consisting in pure bliss and undivided consciousness, the other of a multitude of spatially bounded and active selves? One might have expected Yaśovijaya to say that both have their proper place in a non-onesided attitude towards selfhood, but in fact he gives clear preferential weighting to the unitary conception of self (a conception which he also identifies, in the final chapter, with samatā, a state of pure equanimity). That comes out most clearly in the Adhyātmasāra, where he states unequivocally that the apparent multiplicity of selves is an illusion, likening it to the illusion of a multitude of moons caused by the eye disease timira, double-vision.20 Having repeated once again that the self consists in
