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Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika

Nyāya grew from the art of debate, Vaiśeṣika from the analysis of what there is. The Vaiśeṣikasūtra, ascribed to Kaṇāda, dates from around the turn of the era; the Nyāyasūtra, ascribed to Akṣapāda Gautama, took its present form around the second century CE, and Vātsyāyana’s commentary on it followed around 450. The two developed side by side, Nyāya drawing its account of what there is largely from Vaiśeṣika, until Udayana, in the late tenth century, brought them together; from the fourteenth century the new logic (Navya-Nyāya) of Gaṅgeśa developed for about four centuries.

The Nyāyasūtra opens by making true knowledge of sixteen categories the way to the highest good (1.1.1). The list begins with the means of knowing and runs through doubt, purpose, example and tenet to the forms of debate and the ways an argument fails: an inventory of how inquiry is carried out. The next sūtra gives the end. False knowledge breeds faults, faults breed activity, activity breeds birth, and birth breeds suffering; as each is removed, the next falls away, and the last is release (apavarga, 1.1.2). Vātsyāyana reuses Kauṭilya’s verse for the school’s own discipline, investigation (ānvīkṣikī), “a source of light for all sciences”, and defines it as “examination of objects by the pramāṇas”.

There are four means of knowing: perception, inference, comparison and testimony (1.1.3). Reasoning (tarka) is the work that tests a claim not yet settled, “reasoning which reveals the character by showing the absurdity of all contrary characters” (1.1.40, tr. Vidyabhusana).

The Nyāyasūtra also sets out how to argue. Discussion (vāda) is “the adoption of one of two opposing sides”, analysed in five members, “defended by the aid of any of the means of right knowledge, while its opposite is assailed by confutation, without deviation from the established tenets”. Wrangling (jalpa) “aims at gaining victory” by “quibbles, futilities, and other processes which deserve rebuke”. Cavil (vitaṇḍā) is wrangling “which consists in mere attacks on the opposite side” (1.2.1–3). As B. K. Matilal describes the practice, vāda was “an honest debate … where both sides … are seeking the truth”, held between teacher and students; jalpa was “a winner-takes-all situation” between teachers of different schools, held “before a board or jury called the madhyastha … and a chairman, usually a king or a man with power and money who would organize the debate”. Vātsyāyana denounced cavil.

Debate belongs to the path itself. To reach release one is to study the treatise and “hold discussions with those learned in that treatise” (4.2.47), “with unenvious persons, such as disciples, preceptors, fellow-students and seekers of the summum bonum” (4.2.48). The harder forms keep their use: “Wranglings and cavils may be employed to keep up our zeal for truth just as fences of thorny boughs” protect the sprouting seed (bījaprarohasaṃrakṣaṇa, 4.2.50).

Vaiśeṣika frames its work as an explanation of dharma. The Vaiśeṣikasūtra opens: “Now, therefore, we shall explain Dharma. Dharma (is) that from which (results) the accomplishment of Exaltation and of the Supreme Good” (1.1.1–2, tr. Sinha). In the commonly printed text a later sūtra names the knowledge that leads there: “The Supreme Good (results) from the knowledge … of the essence of the Predicables, Substance, Attribute, Action, Genus, Species, and Combination, by means of their resemblances and differences” (1.1.4). Another recension lacks that sūtra. Praśastapāda, in the sixth century, states the same at the head of his Compendium of the Categories: “A knowledge of the true nature of the six categories … through their similarities and dissimilarities, — is the means of accomplishing the highest bliss” (tr. Jha). The inquiry is an inventory of what there is, and knowing it truly is the way to the end. Its means of knowing are two, perception and inference; testimony, for Praśastapāda, is like the other means of knowledge “included under ‘Inference’, the process of these being similar to that of Inference”.

The new logic changed the form of the work. Gaṅgeśa, in Mithilā in the first half of the fourteenth century, wrote that his book was meant for the decoration of scholars, and that opponents refuted in it would no longer be able to press their views cleverly in debate (as Matilal paraphrases the opening verses). In Matilal’s account his “style, precision, and uniformity, his logical ordering of thoughts and arguments, became the model for all later writers”, and “even a single sentence of his book was later developed and elaborated by his commentators into a separate work”. The school developed, in Jonardon Ganeri’s words, “a precise technical language through the employment of which many traditional philosophical problems could be clarified and resolved”, used “not just by philosophers, but also in poetics, linguistics, legal theory”.