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KARIN PREISENDANZ.
fifteenth century, a return of concern with the Nyāyasūtra, the ancient foundational work of the Nyāya tradition, accompanied by a new kind of focussed and increasingly intense interest in its text-critical analysis which involved inter alia the evaluation of sporadic earlier text-critical remarks and positions; furthermore, the formerly prominent engagement in controversies with Buddhist philosophers occasioned either directly by topics addressed in the Sütra or indirectly by related reflections in the sub-commentaries gives way to the endeavour to present and comment upon, wherever appropriate, the relevant topical discourse found in recent and contemporary Navya-Nyāya treatises. The mentioned turn together with the new attitude may well have been part of a historicist search for originality and authenticity which in this specific case, i.e., with regard to the Nyāyasūtra, had become possible because there was no longer any psychological and ideological need to respond to the Buddhist challenge in any interpretation of and comment on the Sūtra; a second reason may be that the necessity to present the Sūtra as the internally undisputed and unambiguous foundation of the Nyāya tradition vis à vis the Buddhist critics was not felt any longer. The historicist stance indicated by the text-critical approach is also reflected in the more and more prominent historicist periodizations which had been expressed in the works of the Nyāya tradition in north-eastern India already in the thirteenth century. Both intellectual phenomena, the historicist search for originality and authenticity as well as the historicist periodizations, may have been influenced by the increasing intellectual interaction of the non-Muslim elite with Islamic culture which can be specifically demonstrated for some Nyāya scholars, the former phenomenon having possibly been motivated by the wish to assert one's own cultural identity and - in view of the clear realization of the historical antiquity of the object of examination - superiority vis à vis the Muslim rulers. This latter inner motivation may have coincided with or been reinforced by the external factor of the boosted promotion of Sanskritic scholarship by local non-Muslim rulers, some of them Sanskrit scholars themselves and some related to prominent scholars through family ties, for their own purposes of cultural self-assertion and legitimization.
APPENDIX AND OUTLOOK
The line of development regarding the major Nyāyasūtra-commentaries and the attitudes and approaches of their authors sketched