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Anekanta : Philosophy of co-existence
was explained by means of the nayas. The tradition says that the Drstivāda, the twelfth text of the basic scripture, contained philosophical discussions based on different viewpoints. By the third century B.C. the main part of the text was lost, leaving behind only a fragment of it. Vācaka Umāsvāti and Acārya Siddhasena were the pioneers in the application of the nayas to the different philosophical problems of their times and Acārya Samantabhadra carried this process to its consummation by including a good number of new issues that had cropped up by his time. Siddhasena clearly demonstrated that the Samkhya system illustrated the substantial standpoint whereas the Buddhist philosophy is a representative of the modal viewpoint. In this way he made an evaluation of all the systems of thought that were extant, from the relativistic standpoint, with reference to different nayas. The most important treatise of his on the subject is the Sanmati Tarka, while the most significant work of Samantabhadra on this subject is the Apta-Mimāmsā, in which he has most successfully been able to apply the principle of sevenfold predication to the current problems of universal and particular, identity and difference, existence and non-existence and such other mutually opposed doctrines to establish a synthesis between them. Both these treatises can be regarded as pioneer works of the philosophy of non
absolutism.
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