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THE NYAYASŪTRA COMMENTARIAL TRADITION
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regard to his own commentary on the Vaišeṣikasūtra he says that he is eager to demolish the positions of the heretic scholars (paşandipandita).36 The information provided by the author of the Sena court commentary in respect to his teacher's work on the Nyāyasūtra implies a general neglect of the Nyayasutra in the medieval period after the rise of Udayana.37 The then extant commentaries obviously did not enjoy sufficient popularity or were
36 Cf. especially Thakur (1965: 331) as well as Thakur (1970: 36, 1981: xxii); the ninth adhyaya of the Sena court commentary on the Vaiseṣikasūtra was edited by Thakur in 1985 as an appendix to his edition of Vädīndra's long commentary on the Vaiseṣikasūtra (Maharajadhiraja Kameshvar Singh Grantha Mala 21, Darbhanga). The two pre-colophon verses of the Newari ms. (containing the tenth and last adhyaya of the commentary) that praise Śrīmān's (?) revival of Gautama's teachings and refer to the anonymous author's own ambitions run as follows: durvärāsama drpta durjanavacovajränalenähatäḥ śrimadgotamanirmita rasayutas ta bhararivallayah yena prauḍhavikalpajālasalilair ujjīvitāḥ santatam jiyād adbhutakīrtir ujjvalagunah śrīmān asau me guruḥ ||
tatprasāda šamājvāptam mayaitat kincid Tritam/ paşandipanditafvrāta]khaṇḍanāhātakautukāt |
Śrīman, my teacher, of marvellous fame and splendid good qualities, should always be victorious, he who revived, by means of showers of water, [i.e.] the profusion of [his] mature conceptualization, the creepers, [i.e.] words, shaped (composed) by the glorious Gotama [and] full of sap (essence) [but] struck (assaulted) by lightning-fire, [which is] the speech of bad people who are difficult to be checked, mean (?) and arrogant.
Whatever [I] have said [here] out of an eagerness, provoked [by him], to demolish [the positions of] the heterodox scholars has been obtained by me thanks to his graciousness."
The rather aggressive attitude towards heterodox scholars, presumably Buddhists, may be seen in connection with the revival of Brahmanism under the Sena dynasty after the preceding Buddhist Pāla dynasty had mainly supported Buddhist scholarship (cf. Chakravarti, 1906: 157, 1929-1930: 247, 1930: 24).
37 Further post-Udayana and pre-Gangeśa commentaries on the Nyāyasūtra were a certain Bhaskara (cf. Thakur, 1970: 35, 1981: xxi; Sen, 1978) and, possibly, a Ratnakosa by Tarani Miśra (cf. Bhattacharya, 1947: 303, 1958: 76-79 as well as Bhattacharya 1978: chapter II, without reference to this work's being a commentary, and Thakur, 1981: xxi; cf. also GSP 44, 15 [see nn. 102 and 124 below]). Cakrapāṇidatta, the eleventh-century Bengali author of the Ayurvedadipika on the Carakasamhita, is credited by the late medieval commentator on the Carakasamhitā and Cakrapanidatta's Cikitsasangraha, Sivadasasena (fifteenth century), with a Nyayavṛtti (Thakur, loc. cit., unfortunately without reference), which would accord with Cakrapanidatta's obvious first-hand knowledge of the Nyayasütra, as displayed in his commentary, especially on the philosophical-dialectical portions of Carakasamhitā Vimanasthāna, adhyaya 8. However, Meulenbeld's History of Indian Medical Literature does not mention such a work of Cakrapāņidatta's or such an attribution (cf. Meulenbeld, 2000: 86). The works sometimes attributed to Cakrapäṇidatta which are listed in the History include a treatise on grammar (Vyakaranatattvacandrika), but no work in the field of Nyaya.