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INDIAN LOGIC
text is of a mere historical significance. But for this very reason this part has a value of its own; for thereby we learn how the early Nyaya authors were groping towards a path traversing which their. school would play its destined historical role. We know that the most outstanding contributions made by the Nyaya school have been made in the course of seeking to solve the most burning problems of logic understood in a broad sense so as to cover the whole theory of knowledge. But as is natural to expect and is amply demonstrated by Jayanta's performance, the problems of logic could be well covered under the single padartha pramāṇa, and yet the early Nyaya authors were so eager to posit besides this padartha one- called prameya that would cover the problems of ontology and ethics and fourteen more that would miscellaneously cover certain problems arising in connection with inferential demonstration in general and public debate in particular. Subsequently, however, the problems of ontology were consciously entrusted to the fellow-Vaiseṣikas, the problems of ethics were consciously underplayed, while the problems of public debate found no conscious development worth the name. Thus it was that the Nyaya school came to concentrate its attention on the problems of logic pure and simple. So the remaining fourteen padarthas that we have yet to examine are to be viewed as a repository of the seeds which the early Nyaya authors scattered so widely and the later Nyaya authors gradually transferred to the one field their school was destined to cultivate as its own proper field that is, the field of investigating the problems of logic in all their ramifications.
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