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THE NYAYASŪTRA COMMENTARIAL TRADITION
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Naiyāyikas did not consider these groups a serious threat to the doctrinal edifice of Aksapāda and its long-claimed timeless authority. As a result its defence in the form of commentary was no longer intellectually exciting and ceased to present an urgent challenge to Nyāya scholars.
It is telling that the earliest Nyāyasūtra-related commentaries that have come down to us from the post-Buddhist period are two works of a peculiar nature: different from the older commentaries known to us they do not present a running commentary with attached independent reflections on the contemporaneous state of a certain philosophical topic, often inclusive of some polemic discussion, but treat individual, philologically as well as argumentatively difficult points of the basic text and the Nyāyacaturgranthikā, that is, the four classical commentaries from the Bhāşya up to the Parisuddhi. It is a purely scholarly or almost 'antiquarian' interest in the so-called Pañcaprasthānan yāyamahātarka, and primarily in Udayana's commentary, that seems to have prompted the authors of these works. The later of the two, the Jain scholar Abhayatilaka, wrote his Nyāyālankāra in Prahlādanapattana in Gujarat in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. Abhayatilaka, who belonged to the Kharataragaccha, was a pupil of Jineśvarasūri and greatly indebted to his senior fellow student Laksmītilaka" who - according to the concluding verse of the Nyāyālankāra, which is called a pañcaprasthānanyāyamahātarkavişamapadavyākhyā in the colophon"2 – revised the work very carefully,43 as he also did in the case of Abhayatilaka's Dvyāśrayakāvyatīkā.44 The two monks thus appear to have engaged in a joint scholarly project on the classical commentaries on the Nyāyasūtra. Abhayatilaka frequently discusses variant readings to the texts and even suggests emendations, anticipating a new, pronouncedly text-critical approach towards the foundations of a philosophical tradition. Śrīkantha's earlier Tippaņaka, called a pañcaprasthānanyāyamahātarkadurgamārthavyākhyā in the Nyāyā
41 Cf. the references to Jineśvara and Laksmītilaka in the fourth introductory verse of the work (NA I, 11-12). 42 Cf. also the designation as sudurgamapadavyākhyā in NA I, 14 (fourth introductory verse). 43 Cf. NA 794, 19: śrilaksmitilakopādhyāyaih samsodhiteyam atinipunam /. 44 Cf. Thakur (1981: xxx). Further information on Abhayatilaka is provided in the Kharataragacchagurvävali: he was initiated in 1235 and became upādhyāya in 1263, the same year in which he defeated the Digambara Vidyānanda in a debate held at Ujjayini (cf. Thakur, loc. cit.).