Kundakunda is the most influential Digambara author and one of the most poorly dated figures in Indian intellectual history — proposals range from the first century CE to the eighth, and the evidence does not settle it. His importance is the introduction of a two-standpoint method: the vyavahara naya, the conventional or practical standpoint, from which vows, ritual, the body and karma are all real and matter enormously; and the nishchaya naya, the ultimate standpoint, from which the soul is pure, unbound, and has never been anything else. The Samayasara works relentlessly from the second. The consequences have been contested for a thousand years, because the text can be read as making the entire apparatus of Jain practice provisional — a reading that the Adhyatma movement, Banarsidas in the seventeenth century, and the twentieth-century Kanji Swami Panth all took up in different ways, to the alarm of the mendicant establishment. Digambara monastic lineages are named after him, the Kundakundanvaya, and the tension between the two standpoints is the engine of most internal Digambara argument.