Studies in Haribhadrasuri

Author(s): N M Kansara, G C Tripathi
Publisher: B L Institute of Indology

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Studies in Haribhadrasūri acquires wisdom,55 treads upon the right path and appreciates merit. Haribhadra compares the Jaina conception of Tirthankara with the Buddhist one of Bodhisattva. 56 He distinguishes three categories of the souls destined to be emancipated, the Tirthankara,57 Ganadharas,58 and Mundā-kevalins.59 Haribhadra's, contribution also lies in suggesting fivefold stages of preliminary preparation for Yoga as we find in Patañjali's scheme of Yama and Niyama. As has been mentioned earlier, the stages of the soul are Adhyatma, Bhavana, Dhyāna, 2 Samatã,63 and Vrtti-samksaya. Here the accumulated and obscuring Karmas are destroyed forever and the soul attains omniscience 64 and final emancipation.
In the YDS, Haribhadra presents a novel plan of classification of yogic stages.65 The core of this scheme is the concept of Drsti, which means attitude towards truth. The most important feature of spiritual development is acquisition of love of truth (samyag-drsti). The gradual purification of its love of truth takes place in correspondence to the purification of the soul. So long as the soul has not cut off the knot and attained purification, its attitude is bound to be wrong and perverse, termed as avidyā, mithyātva or darśana-moha. Without purification, the soul can have only commonplace attitude (mogha-drsti) as opposed to the right attitude (sad-drsti) or the attitude of a spiritually advanced soul (yoga-drsți). Haribhadra has listed eight kinds of spiritual development of the love of truth (drsti) corresponding to the eightfold stages of Patañjali's Yoga, and he refers to the consensus of opinion of a number of authors regarding the stages of Yoga in his auto-commentary on the YDS.67 His love of truth is so great that he can never be sectarian. He asks us to realize the truth by means of all the three organs, viz., scripture, logic and practice, of Yoga in keeping with the best-tried and trusted tradition of India. The truth is one. It cannot be multiple. There is only the difference of views or terminology. Yoga is not the monopoly of a particular sect or system. It is based on direct experience of the seers and