________________
56
and during this period I will have to provide a wider context and therefore first present a concise survey and analysis of the earlier commentarial tradition. Only with some understanding of this prehistory, both in general and from the relevant points of view such as the commentators' motivation in composing their works, their intended audience, their attitude towards the foundational text and other, earlier commentarial works of the tradition, and their selfunderstanding in general, can one proceed to ask the right questions, to examine these aspects in the commentarial tradition of the relevant pre-colonial period, and to characterize its development and special features. Wherever possible, observations relating to the social and political-historical contexts of the authors of these commentaries and to the circulation of their works will be made.
KARIN PREISENDANZ
As is well known, it was during Kushana rule and the following Gupta period that the major philosophical traditions of Classical South Asia crystallized on the sub-continent. Among them, the Nyaya or 'logic' tradition most probably arose within an intellectual environment of thinkers who were concerned in a scholarly manner with the prerequisites and principles of sound academic debate, with its instruments and its general rules; at the same time these thinkers must have also become engaged in philosophical questions, foremost in questions belonging to the domain of epistemology, which is of immediate relevance to debate, but also in questions pertaining to philosophy of nature, that is, the realm of physics, and to some extent metaphysics. This combination of areas of intellectual concern pro-. vided fertile ground for the formation of a full-fledged philosophical tradition. Inasmuch as the art of debate and reasoned argumentation is of relevance to all philosophical and scholarly endeavours, it is not surprising that the Nyaya tradition from early on occupied a central position in South Asian intellectual history, which is reflected in its strong influence on other philosophical traditions and Sanskritic sciences in general, from a doctrinal as well as from a formal point of view.
The Nyayasutra or Nyayaśästra, as the foundational work of the tradition is most commonly called in the early tradition, is ascribed to the sage Akṣapāda of the Gotama clan; there are indications that it was probably finalized in its classical form available to us nowadays. by anonymous redactors in the first half of the fifth century.2 Next to its most ancient core, i.e., the first and last chapters, which betrays the
For a summary, cf. e.g., Franco/Preisendanz (1998a).
2 Cf. Franco/Preisendanz (1995: 85-86), Franco (2002: 283).