Kundakunda

Kundakunda is among the most revered teachers of the Digambara Jain tradition, whose monks renounce even clothing. Little is known of his life. Tradition places him in South India, and many later Digambara lineages trace themselves to him; his name, perhaps taken from a place, is invoked at the beginning of Digambara rituals. Scholars date him anywhere from the second to the eighth century CE, and the question remains open.

Several works in Prakrit are attributed to him, among them the Samayasāra, “the essence of the self”, the Pravacanasāra, on the essence of the teaching, and the Pañcāstikāyasāra, on the constituents of reality. They may not all be by the same hand, but together they form one of the foundations of Digambara philosophy.

Kundakunda’s distinctive contribution is his distinction between two standpoints: the conventional standpoint (vyavahāra-naya), from which the soul is described as bound, embodied and acting, and the ultimate standpoint (niścaya-naya), from which the soul is pure consciousness, untouched by karma. His teaching was revived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by lay movements, and in the twentieth by Kanji Swami, and remains much read.