The Samayasara is Kundakunda's central work and the reason Jainism has a mystical literature at all. It is written from the nishchaya naya, the ultimate standpoint, from which the soul is and always has been pure, unbound, and entirely distinct from karmic matter, the body, and the psychological states that appear to belong to it — which are described as belonging to matter and only misattributed to the self through ignorance. From this vantage even the vows and the ritual apparatus are pudgala, matter, and not the soul's own. Kundakunda is careful to say that the conventional standpoint is necessary and that the practices are how one gets anywhere, but the force of the writing is all in the other direction. The consequences have been running ever since: Banarsidas and the seventeenth-century Adhyatma movement, the Digambara Terapanth, and in the twentieth century the Kanji Swami Panth all read Kundakunda as licence to relocate religion from ritual to realisation, and mendicant establishments have consistently pushed back. Anyone trying to understand why modern Jain reform movements keep taking the same shape should read this text first.