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Introduction
CCXLVII
returned; because the order in narrating events adopted by the Pr. Cha. is not always chronological.
It is more likely that Vīrācharya might have met the Sāmkhya dialectician before he left Anahilla pura; in fact the power of debate that Vīrāchārya showed, might have been the cause of his intimacy with Jayasimha.
Vīrāchārya also defeated in debate one Kamalakīrti a Digambara dialectician. The Pr. Cha. gives no dates about him (pp. 272 - 277).
Deva Sūrior Vādi Deva Sūri – Devasuri the Dialectician as he became known - was one of the great masters of Logic and Dialectics whose activities were spread in the reigns of Siddharaja Jayasimha and Kumārapāla. He belonged, as we saw, to that school of great logicians of Muni Chadra sūri and his teacher Säntīsūri, who himself, as we saw, was a student of Abhayadevasūri – the author of that great philosophical work known as Tattavabodhavidhāyiņā or more significantly Vāda Mahārņava - the Ocean of Dialectics - in the form of a commentary on the Sanmatitarka of Siddhasena Divākara. * The praises bestowed on Devasūri by contemporary learned men like Devabodha of the Bhāgavata sect and Hemachandra himself and the dramatist Yaşaschandra as well as later logicians like Yaşovijaya, are, we find, not unfounded when we study Devasuri's Pramāna - naya - tattvāloka and his Syādvādaratnākara. In his own days, especially, in the early part of his career,
* This work has been edited by Pandit Sukhlal and Pandit Bechardas and published in Alve volumes by the Gujarat Puratattva Mandir, Ahmedabad.
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