ARCHARYA KUNDAKUNDA

ARCHARYA KUNDAKUNDA
Great organizer of highly complex ideas

By Prof. Yashwant Malaiya, Colorado

In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, atop a hill known as Ponnur Malai, on a large stone under a certain champa tree pilgrims may come across an engravedpair of stylized footprints (charan). These footprints are symbolic of a thinker who, nearly tow millennia ago composed some of the most influential philosophical books in world history. Some scholars from generations since then remember the exact day of their first encounter with his spiritual masterpiece, the Samaya Sara.

Among the most famous of all Jain acharyas, Kundakunda, the celebrated author of the four renowned books Samaya Sara (Treatise of the True Self), Pravachana Sara (Treatise of Lectures), Niyama Sara (Treatise on Pure Rules), Panchastikaya Sara (Treatise on Five Universal Components) and Ashta Pahuda (Eight Steps), which is a collection eight texts. All his works are written in a Jain dialect known as Shourseni Prakrit. The organization of Jain ideas into certain relationships and structures taken for granted in more recent centuries was ultimately a product of his genius. Such has been his fame since early items, that many other books actually written by his pupils and others are popularly ascribed to him. In the Digambar tradition he is named immediately after Lord Mahavira and the preceptor Indrabhuti Goutam in the Mangalacharana (auspicious blessing) prayer, and Jains of the Digambar tradition dub their tradition Kundakund-anvaya (the order of Kundakunda). However, scholars of all sects study his books with deep veneration.

He was born around the beginning of the first century AD in South India in a place becoming a Jain monk was Padmanandi, but he is better known by the place of his origin. Kundakunda mentions that he was an intellectual descendant of Bhadrabahu I, the last Shrut Kevalin. Kundakunda belonged to an ancient order called the Nandi Sangha, wherein most monks assumed names ending in ‘nandi’. The Punyashrava Katha Kosh mentions that in his previous life, Kundakunda was a cow-herder who had found and preserved ancient texts and was blessed by a wandering monk. Acharya Kundakunda’s intense learning and moral character attracted royal disciples such as King Shivakumar. The story of Kundakunda is also surrounded buy legend- it is even said he could walk in air.

Kundakunda’s influence extends far beyond Jainism. India has always been a land where philosophical debate is a standard feature of intellectual life. The concise and systematized aphorismic forms he brought to Jain literature and the literary structures in which he explained Jainism’s most advanced scientific principles relating to such area as atomic structure, cosmic dimensions, the cosmic ethers, and psychology, rivaled anything produced up to that time anywhere in the world. Hindu and Buddhist thinkers were put to the task of finding ways to respond to his explications of Jain philosophy and conduct, and he thus set unprecedented levels of erudition and rationalism in India’s overall philosophical discourse which would last through modern times.

Out of enthusiastic respect, Acharya Kundakunda has been called “Light of this Dark Age”. Several commentaries on his Samaya Sara have been written in Sanskrit and modern languages. In more recent centrues, the Samaya Sara had greatly moved leaders and scholars like Banarasi Das, Taran Svami, Shrimad Rajachandra and Kanaji Swami.

Acharya Kundkund

If recent research is correct in considering him to have belonged to the second or third century ad, then this would make him the first significant and independent thinker of the post-canonical period whose views are accepted as representing the essence of Jaina thought. Although he was a pioneering Digambara thinker, probablyfrom South India, appreciation for his views also comes from the Digambar sect of Jainism. He was also known as Padmanandi. The name Grudhapiccha, erroneously used for him since about the fourteenth century, has led to confusion because it is also an alias for Umaswati.

A total of eighty-four works on various themes are ascribed to Kundakunda, of which fifteen are extant and three may be said to be philosophical masterpieces, all written in the Prakrit language. These are the Pañchastikaya (Essence of the Five Existent= s), the Pravacanasara (Essence of the Scripture) and the Samayasaa (Esse= nce of the Doctrine). The Pañcstikya and samaysara is an elementary work=dealingwith the Jaina substances (excluding time because it does not occupy any spatial points) and the fundamental truths, to which two additional categories are added, namely the meritorious and demeritorious acts related to karma (puṇya and pāpa). The Samaya= samaysara emphasizes, among other things, two standpoints mentioned in the canonical literature which seem to have no relation to the standard sevenfold standpoint (see Manifoldness, Jaina Theory of). These are the `definitive' standpoint (niścayanaya), used synonymously with the `pure' or `transcendental' (śuddha or paramārtha) standpoint,= and the `mundane' standpoint (vyavahārikanaya). It is an illuminating work dealing with the nature of the soul and its contamination by matter, and whether the soul's intrinsic nature is in any way affected or changed through karma bondage in so far as it is the doer and enjoyer of activities. An attempt is made to reconcile theseproblems, solutions to which depend on the standpoint from which one approaches the issues. The Pravacanasāra is an insightful work whose three sections clearly delineate its scope: knowledge, the objects of knowledge, and conduct. The problem of substance, quality and mode, is one of the pivotal issues in Jaina philosophy and a few points are outlined below in order to show how Kundakunda deals with it. It forms the subject matter of the second section of the Pravacanasara,which the tenth-century commentator Amṛtacandra says Kundakunda `properly discusses'.

The problem is basically that of how change in the world may be explained given the permanent, eternal nature of the two basic substances of ultimate reality; this has obvious implications for the essential nature of the soul. Kundakunda begins the section with the statement: `The object of knowledge is made up of substances, which are said to be characterized by qualities, and with which, moreover, are (associated) the modifications' (Pravacanasāra II, 1; trans. A.N.Upadhye). The basic problem is then evident when he says: `There can be no origination without destruction, nor is there destruction without origination; origination and destruction are not possible in the absence of permanent substantiality' (II, 8). How `origination' and `destruction', which in fact refer to change, are to beunderstood is expressed by Kundakunda in typical Jaina language in II, 19: `The substance forever retains its position, its own nature, as endowed with positive and negative conditions according as it is looked at from the substantial and the modificational viewpoints.'This is further elaborated:

All substances are nondifferent from the substantial viewpoint, but again they are different from the modificational view-point, because of the individual modification pervading it for the time being. According to some modification or the other it is stated that a substance exists, does not exist, is indescribable, is both or otherwise.

(II, 22–3)What Kundakunda means by origination and destruction is distinctively Jainist and is clarified later in the same section: `In this world, in which modifications originate and pass away at every moment, nothing is absolutely produced or destroyed; what is the production of one modification is the destruction of another; and thus origination and destruction are different' (II, 27). The change that occurs in matter is understandable on the analogy of objects and colour. Just as gold (regarded here as a substance), for example, can have not only different shades of colour (with colour being its basic quality) but also different forms (with the object made out of gold being its modification), so too all substances retain their substantiality despite the apparent destruction of their qualitiesand modes. The situation is more complicated with the soul substance. The problem is technical, and relates to two `operations' (upayogas) ascribed to the soul, namely `indeterminate intuition' and `determinate knowledge'; these operations are described as two qualities (guṇas) of the soul. The concern is with the unity or identity of the soul and involves the question of whether the two upayogas operate in the soul simultaneously or in succession, and if in succession, which is first, and whether they maintain their distinctness in the state of omniscience. Kundakunda maintains that they operate successively at the mundane level and simultaneously at the transcendental level of omniscience. His view, which is also held by Umāsvāti, represents the attitude of the Digambara sect and is=

opposed, for example, by Siddhasena Divakara, who, in regarding quality and mode as synonyms, says that they are not separate operations in the state of omniscience. His view represents the general Śvetāmbara standpoint, based on the fact that the canonical literature distinguishes only substance and quality, withoutmentioning the standpoint connected with the modifications of a substance.