Religion, Philosophy and Devotional Traditions

Nirvana translates as blowing out or extinguishing, and what is extinguished are the three fires of the Buddhist analysis: raga or craving, dvesha or aversion, and moha or delusion. This follows directly from the Second and Third Noble Truths, which locate the origin of suffering in tanha, craving, and identify liberation with its cessation.

• Option (a) states this in the metaphor the tradition itself uses and is the official answer.
• Option (b) is incorrect and is the most instructive wrong answer, since it asserts annihilation of a self whose existence Buddhism denies at the outset. The doctrine of anatta holds that there is no permanent substantial self to annihilate, only the five aggregates in flux, so nirvana cannot be the destruction of a self; the Buddha treated both eternalism and annihilationism as extremes to be avoided.
• Option (c) is incorrect because it describes nirvana as a positive hedonic state, which assimilates it to the heavens of the cosmology, themselves impermanent and within samsara; the tradition describes it as the cessation of suffering rather than as pleasure.
• Option (d) is incorrect because although nirvana is held to be beyond conceptual description, the question asks what best describes the concept, and an assertion that it cannot be described is an evasion rather than a description. The elimination route is anatta, which defeats option (b) outright and is the fact the question is really testing.

• Statement 1 is correct. In Jain doctrine karma is not a moral abstraction but a subtle material substance, pudgala, which flows into the soul through asrava and binds it through bandha. Liberation therefore requires two operations, samvara, the stopping of fresh inflow, and nirjara, the shedding of accumulated karmic matter, and nirjara is accomplished by tapas, austerity and penance, in its external and internal forms. Penance is thus literally the method of destroying karma, culminating in sallekhana, the fast unto death.
• Statement 2 is correct. Jainism extends jiva far beyond the animate world of ordinary usage: the ekendriya or one sensed beings include the earth bodied, water bodied, fire bodied, air bodied and plant bodied souls, so a particle of earth or a drop of water has a soul. This is the doctrinal foundation of Jain ahimsa in its most rigorous form, which is why the Jain monastic discipline governs walking, drinking, sweeping and breathing.
• Statement 3 is correct and follows from the first: karma is what obstructs the soul's innate qualities of infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy, so it is the bane of the soul and its complete removal is moksha. All three being correct, the official answer is (d). The unifying principle is the materiality of karma in Jainism, which distinguishes it from the Buddhist and Brahmanical treatments and from which all three statements follow.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Sankhya is one of the six orthodox darshanas and accepts samsara and transmigration in full. Its account is that the purusha, pure consciousness, becomes wrongly identified with prakriti and its evolutes, and it is the subtle body, the linga sharira composed of buddhi, ahamkara, the mind and the subtle elements, that persists through death and carries the accumulated dispositions from one embodiment to the next until liberation. The rejection of rebirth in Indian philosophy belongs to the Charvaka or Lokayata materialists alone, which is the fact that makes this statement identifiable as false without any specific knowledge of Sankhya.
• Statement 2 is correct and is the school's central soteriological claim. Liberation, kaivalya, comes from vivekakhyati, the discriminative knowledge that the purusha is entirely distinct from prakriti, and from nothing else. Sankhya in its classical form is nirishvara, without a lord: Ishvarakrishna's Sankhyakarika argues no god into the system, and liberation therefore depends on no external agent, no grace and no ritual, but only on the knowledge the self attains of itself. This is precisely what distinguishes it from the theistic schools and from the Yoga darshana with which it is otherwise paired. The official answer (b) follows. The governing principle, and the route in for a candidate who has not read Sankhya specifically, is that near universal acceptance of rebirth across Indian schools makes any statement denying it the likely falsehood.

Both statements are incorrect, so the official answer is (d).

• Statement 1 is incorrect: the Bijak is the principal compilation of the verses of Kabir, made by the Kabirpanth and organised into the ramainis, the sabdas and the sakhis, and the word means a seed or an inventory, in the sense of a document pointing to hidden treasure. The compositions of Dadu Dayal, the sixteenth-century saint of Rajasthan who founded the Dadupanth, are collected as the Dadu Bani or Dadu Anubhav Vani.
• Statement 2 is incorrect: Pushti Marg, the path of grace, was propounded by Vallabhacharya in the early sixteenth century on the metaphysics of Shuddhadvaita, pure non-dualism, and centres on the devotion to Krishna as Shrinathji, the Nathdwara temple being its principal seat. Madhvacharya, of the thirteenth century, propounded Dvaita, thoroughgoing dualism, and the Brahma Sampradaya of Udupi. The item is a straightforward test of whether the candidate attaches texts and doctrines to the right teachers, and both statements are constructed by the same method, attaching a real text or doctrine to the wrong figure, so a candidate who catches the method after the first statement will treat the second with suspicion.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Siddhas or Sittars of the Tamil country were a heterodox ascetic and mystical tradition, numbered conventionally at eighteen, who held to a single formless divine principle, rejected image worship and temple ritual, criticised caste and the authority of the Brahmana priesthood, and expressed themselves in vernacular Tamil verse. Their monotheism and their hostility to idolatry are the two features most often cited to distinguish them from the temple-centred bhakti of the Alvars and Nayanars.
• Statement 2 is also correct. The Lingayats or Virasaivas, founded in the Kannada region in the twelfth century and associated above all with Basava, rejected the caste hierarchy, opposed Brahmanical ritual and the authority of the Vedas, permitted widow remarriage, and questioned the doctrine of rebirth, a position visible in their burial rather than cremation of the dead, which presupposes union with Shiva at death rather than transmigration. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each require rejecting a true proposition. There is no elimination route, since the two traditions are independent and the specific doctrinal claims made about each go beyond the level at which the Siddhas in particular are usually taught. This is a difficult item honestly set.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminating statement. The Bodhisattva ideal is central to Mahayana, not Hinayana. The Hinayana or Theravada path holds up the arhat, who attains nirvana through individual discipline and insight and does not remain to ferry others across; the term bodhisattva does appear in the earlier tradition, but confined to the previous lives of Gautama himself, not as a general ideal open to all practitioners.
• Statement 2 is correct: the Bodhisattva is defined by karuna, compassion, joined to the aspiration for bodhi, and is one who has generated the awakening mind but has not yet attained full Buddhahood, hence 'on his way to enlightenment'.
• Statement 3 is correct and states the vow that distinguishes the ideal: the Bodhisattva postpones final nirvana in order to work for the liberation of all sentient beings, Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri and Maitreya being the best known figures. Hence 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a), (c) and (d) all fail: (a) and (d) accept the Hinayana attribution, and (c) rejects the self-postponement vow which is the very content of the ideal. Recognising the Mahayana attribution alone settles the question.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Sautrantika and the Sammitiya were schools of Buddhism, not sects of Jainism. The Sautrantikas took their name from their insistence that the sutras alone, and not the Abhidharma, are authoritative, and they held a rigorous doctrine of momentariness. The Sammitiyas were the principal school of the Pudgalavada or personalist tradition, controversial within Buddhism for maintaining a pudgala, an inexpressible person, neither identical with nor different from the aggregates. Jain divisions run on entirely different lines, Digambara and Svetambara, with sub sects such as the Sthanakavasi and the Terapanthi.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the central Sarvastivada doctrine, from which the school takes its name, sarvam asti, all exists. Against the general Buddhist position that a dharma exists only in the present instant, the Sarvastivadins held that the constituents of phenomena exist in all three times, past, present and future, and that what changes is not their existence but their mode or activity, so that a dharma persists latently before and after its moment of operation. The item is difficult because there is no elimination route and both statements demand a level of doctrinal detail well beyond ordinary preparation; a candidate who merely recognises Sautrantika as Buddhist can, however, reject statement 1 and reduce the question to (b) against (d).

• Option (b) is correct. The Sthanakvasi are a sect of Svetambara Jainism, founded in the seventeenth century by Lavaji and tracing its impulse to the fifteenth century reformer Lonka Shah. Its defining position is the rejection of idol worship and of temple based ritual, on the argument that image worship finds no sanction in the canonical texts and involves himsa. Sthanakvasi monks and nuns therefore worship in a plain hall, the sthanak from which the sect takes its name, rather than in a temple, and they wear the muhpatti, a strip of cloth over the mouth, to avoid harm to airborne life.
• Options (c) and (d) are wrong for a reason that also supplies the elimination: Vaishnavism and Shaivism are the two great theistic streams of Hinduism and both are centrally organised around temple worship and image devotion, so a sect defined by the rejection of idols could hardly belong to either.
• Option (a) is wrong, and it is the plausible distractor because Buddhism and Jainism are grouped together as the heterodox traditions and Buddhism has its own non theistic strands; but the Sthanakvasi are not a Buddhist school, and Buddhism's Indian sectarian divisions run along the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana lines rather than through this dispute. Placing the sect correctly also fixes the wider map of Jain divisions: Digambara and Svetambara at the first level, and within the Svetambara the image worshipping Murtipujaka against the non image worshipping Sthanakvasi and the later Terapanthi, which broke from the Sthanakvasi in the eighteenth century.

Hence (b).

• Option (c) is correct. Maitreya is the future Buddha of Mahayana and indeed of Theravada tradition, at present a bodhisattva residing in the Tushita heaven and awaiting the age in which the teaching of Shakyamuni has been forgotten, when he will descend, attain enlightenment and preach the dharma anew. He is the fifth and last of the Buddhas of the present aeon and is conventionally shown seated in the European fashion with both legs pendant, in expectation of his descent, and carrying a stupa in the crown and a water vessel.
• Options (a), (b) and (d) fail together and for the same reason, which is the clean elimination in the question: Avalokiteshvara, Lokesvara and Padmapani are three names for a single figure, the bodhisattva of compassion, Padmapani meaning lotus bearer and Lokesvara lord of the world, and he is a present rather than a future bodhisattva, vowed to remain until all beings are liberated. Since three options denote one figure and the question asks for one answer, none of the three can be correct, and the odd name out must be the answer even for a candidate who has no independent knowledge of Maitreya. The Ajanta painting known as Padmapani is the best known Indian image of that figure and reinforces the identification.

Hence (c).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Nimbarka, the Vaishnava acharya who founded the Dvaitadvaita or dualistic non dualism school and the Nimbarka sampradaya centred on Radha and Krishna, belongs to the thirteenth century and possibly earlier, several centuries before Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605.
• Statement 2 is incorrect on straightforward chronology. Kabir belongs to the fifteenth century and died around 1518, whereas Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the Naqshbandi divine known as Mujaddid Alf i Sani, lived from 1564 to 1624 and was a contemporary of Akbar and Jahangir. A figure born some forty six years after Kabir's death cannot have influenced him. Since both statements fail, the official answer (d) follows. The governing principle is that chronology alone settles this item. Sirhindi is firmly fixed by his opposition to Akbar's religious policy and his correspondence in Jahangir's reign, so placing him after Kabir requires no knowledge of doctrine, and the four acharyas of the Vaishnava sampradayas, namely Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka and Vallabha, all belong to the early medieval and medieval centuries rather than to the Mughal era.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Sthaviravadins, the elders, are the conservative school that survives as Theravada and is grouped under Hinayana. They stood in opposition to the Mahasanghikas, from whose line Mahayana tendencies emerged.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Lokottaravadins, who held that the Buddha was transcendent and that his earthly life was an appearance, were an offshoot of the Mahasanghika school.
• Statement 3 is correct. The Mahasanghika elevation of the Buddha from teacher to object of devotion, together with the bodhisattva ideal, supplied the theological foundation on which Mahayana developed. Correct combination is 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (d) misplace the Sthaviravadins in Mahayana, and (c) drops the Lokottaravadin link.

In Mahayana doctrine the paramitas are the perfections cultivated by one who takes the bodhisattva vow, classically six in number, namely giving, moral conduct, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. Hence (c).

• Option (a) is wrong because the earliest aphoristic legal texts are the Dharmasutras of Gautama, Baudhayana, Apastamba and Vasishtha.
• Option (b) is wrong because schools rejecting Vedic authority are the nastika systems, Charvaka, Buddhism and Jainism.
• Option (d) is wrong because the great southern trading corporations are the Ayyavole or Five Hundred Svamis of Aihole, the Manigramam and the Nanadesi. The trap here is that all four options describe genuine categories from Indian cultural history, so elimination alone will not work and the term itself must be known.

• Pair 1 is correct. Parivrajaka denotes one who has gone forth, the wandering renunciant who has abandoned household life, the term being used across the Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain traditions and appearing also as a dynastic title in the Gupta period.
• Pair 2 is incorrect and is the discriminating item. Shramana means one who strives or exerts, and denotes the ascetic of the non Vedic traditions, Buddhist, Jain and Ajivika. The shramana stands in explicit opposition to the brahmana, the priest of high ritual status, and the two words name the two rival streams of early Indian religious life.
• Pair 3 is correct, upasaka being the lay male devotee who takes refuge and observes the precepts without entering the order, the female counterpart being upasika. The answer is 1 and 3, giving (b).

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched. Aryadeva was a Buddhist, not a Jaina, scholar, the principal disciple of Nagarjuna and author of the Chatuhshataka, a foundational figure of the Madhyamaka school.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Dignaga was a Buddhist scholar, the founder of the Buddhist school of logic and epistemology, whose Pramanasamuchchaya reshaped Indian philosophical debate and drew responses from Brahmanical logicians for centuries.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. Nathamuni was a Vaishnava scholar, the first of the Sri Vaishnava acharyas, who recovered and organised the Tamil hymns of the Alvars into the Nalayira Divya Prabandham and established their liturgical use in temple worship. Exactly two pairs are correct, giving (c).
• Option (d) requires accepting Aryadeva as a Jaina, option (b) requires rejecting one of the two sound pairs, and option (a) rejects all three.

Ramanuja, the eleventh and twelfth century exponent of Vishishtadvaita or qualified non dualism, held that the individual self and the world are real and form the body of Brahman, and that liberation comes through bhakti, loving devotion to a personal God, supported by prapatti or complete surrender. Against Shankara's insistence on knowledge as the means, Ramanuja placed devotion, and it is this that made his system the philosophical foundation of the Sri Vaishnava tradition and connected it to the Alvar hymns.

• Option (a) states this and is correct.
• Option (b) states the Mimamsa position on the eternality and self existent authority of the Vedas; Ramanuja accepted scriptural authority but that proposition is not what distinguishes his teaching on salvation.
• Option (c) states the Nyaya emphasis on logical argument as the road to the highest good, which is not Ramanuja's.
• Option (d) points to meditation as the means, which belongs with the Yoga and Advaita emphases rather than with the devotional path Ramanuja taught.

Hence (a).