Samayasāra turns attention again and again to the pure soul (śuddha ātmā) as the central reality. The soul is described as an eternal, conscious substance (dravya) whose intrinsic nature is pure awareness (upayoga), knowledge, perception, bliss, and energy, fundamentally distinct from body, mind, and all material forms. All changing conditions—pleasure and pain, bondage and delusion—are treated as transient modes (bhāva) that do not touch this essence. The text thus insists on a radical separation between jīva and ajīva, or soul and non-soul, including the body, senses, and karmic matter. Mistaking these foreign elements for the self is portrayed as the root of spiritual ignorance and bondage.

To articulate this, Samayasāra makes systematic use of two standpoints: niścaya naya, the ultimate perspective, and vyavahāra naya, the conventional perspective. From the conventional standpoint, it is meaningful to say “I act,” “I suffer,” and to speak of the soul as doer and enjoyer of karmic results. From the ultimate standpoint, however, the soul as pure consciousness is a non-doer; all activities belong to the body–mind complex and to matter. This dual framework allows the text to affirm the soul’s intrinsic purity while still accounting for ethical responsibility and spiritual practice in the empirical world. Discriminative knowledge (bheda-vijñāna) between these two levels of truth becomes the doorway to self-realization.

Karmic bondage is presented as the adhesion of subtle material particles (pudgala, dravya-karma) to the soul, brought about and sustained by the soul’s own passions and mental states (bhāva-karma). Karma is treated as a foreign, non-conscious substance that obscures the soul’s natural luminosity, rather than as an intrinsic feature of the self. Anger, pride, deceit, and greed are singled out as primary passions that bind the soul and perpetuate the cycle of rebirth and suffering. When deluded belief in “I am the body, I am the doer” loosens, these passions subside, karmic influx is checked, and the process of inner disentanglement begins.

Within this vision, liberation (mokṣa) is not a journey to another place but a stable abiding in one’s own pure nature, free from karmic obscuration. Samayasāra emphasizes that true religion lies in this inward turn: an experiential recognition of the soul’s essence rather than reliance on external ritual alone. Right faith, right knowledge, and right conduct (the three jewels) are portrayed as an integrated transformation—an inner alignment that arises with genuine insight into the pure soul. When attention rests in pure consciousness (śuddha upayoga) rather than in its changing modes, the essence of the teaching—samaya, the core of the self—stands revealed as the ever-free ground of spiritual life.