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THE NYAYASŪTRA COMMENTARIAL TRADITION
"In the following I will [now] compose a compendium of the teaching (sästra) that has been proclaimed by Akṣapāda, the foremost of sages, for the sake of the world's [mental and spiritual] peace, [a compendium] which [should] cause the misperceptions of poor logicians to vanish."9
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It is generally assumed and indeed highly probable that the 'poor logicians' (kutärkika) referred to by Uddyotakara here were foremost the proponents of the rising school of Buddhist epistemology and logic, in the first place Vasubandhu and Dignaga, the major critics of relevant aspects of the early Nyaya tradition, with whose novel conceptions Uddyotakara concerned himself in extensive polemic discussions. From our point of view, but by no means explicated in this way by Uddyotakara himself, their critique resulted from the antiquity and outdatedness of the foundational text of Nyaya in logical matters, a situation which would normally require, as the appropriate reaction of a commentator whose tradition is under attack, a fresh interpretation of the old positions in the light of the new developments, here the developments in logic brought about by Buddhist thinkers. However, Akṣapäda's status of a sage (muni) addressed by Uddyotakara in his mangalaśloka may have ruled out such an interpretation in the latter's eyes. This status becomes evident also in the concluding verse of the Nyayabhäşya where Vätsyäyana refers to Akṣapāda as a ṛṣi; could it be that even though the last touches on the final redaction of the classical Nyayasutra cannot have taken place much earlier than some fifty years before the composition of the Bhasya,2 Vätsyäyana rightly realized that the core portions of the Sutra go further back in time? As regards Uddyotakara's reference to the purpose of Akṣapäda's teaching, namely, to the mental and spiritual peace of the world (jagataḥ śamaya), it could
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9 Cf. NV 1, 3-4:
yad akṣapadaḥ pravaro munīnām śamāya śāstram jagato jagāda | kutärkikajananivṛttihetuh karisyate tasya maya nibandha
.
Umesh Mishra, whose account of the history of classical Nyaya displays an astonishingly fierce anti-Buddhist attitude, thinks that the verse refers to Buddhist attempts to 'destroy' or 'distort' the Nyayasutra because their own arguments had been refuted with the help of the powerful logical and dialectical means expounded there (cf. Mishra, 1966: 21).
10 Cf. already Vacaspati Miśra's commentary treated below on pp. 60-61. "Cf. NBh 320, 17-18:
yo 'kṣapadam ṛṣim nyayaḥ pratyabhad vadatām varam
tasya vatsyayana idam bhāṣyajātam avartayat ||.
12 On the date of the Nyayabhāṣya, cf. Franco and Preisendanz (1995) and Franco (2002: 282-283), corroborating Oberhammer (1964).