________________ 322 ASIAN STUDIES Through this threefold unfolding of the nature of nyayah, as Paksilasvamin carries out in his introduction to the Nyayabhasyam at the occasion of the justification of the categories of the Nyayasutras, he has not only definitively formulated an old development of idea within the school, but through the explanation of this nature, he has also determined the further development of the Nyaya, whose aspect of Adhyatma-doctrine began to fade more and more into the background, 54 while the specific and formal aspect of Nyaya as science of nyayah and of vadah comes more and more into the foreground, until in the Navyanyaya this is the only important aspect. Thus Paksilasvamin can be considered, in a somewhat inaccurate generalization, to have been the most important thinker of the old Nyaya, perhaps even of the Nyaya in general, not because his theories were not surpassed in later times, but because it was he, who -- as far as we know - brought the Nyaya to its self-knowledge and thereby to the knowledge of itself as a real science. - 54 This aspect slowly disappeared through the gradual fusion of the Nyaya with Vaisesika from about the 17th century A.D. when there existed practically only the combined school of Nyaya-Vaibesikam.
