Indologica Taurinensia

Author(s): Colette Caillat, Siegfried Lienhard, Irma Piovano, Saverio Sani
Publisher: Comitato AIT

Page 32

Piotr Balcerowicz
The injunction within the bolded phrase is exactly the same as the one found in Prajñākaragupta, and the detailed description of the whole process which finally leads to “perception for others’, triggered by a verbal statement, is to explicate the perceptual nature of this process, as against Prajñākaragupta's position.
The fact that it is Siddharsi-ganin who, in his commentary on NA, defends the idea propounded by Siddhasena Mahāmati in NA may lend some additional support to the claim that it was indeed the Nyāyâvatāra which Prajñākaragupta had in mind. And that may be taken as a corroboration of the hypothesis that the time of composition of the Pramāna-vārttikâlankāra is terminus ad quem for Siddhasena Mahāmati. As long as we do not prove that it was indeed Siddhasena Mahāmati who was the first to introduce the idea of parârthânumāna this remains only a very probable postulate. This does not have much bearing on the dating of Siddhasena Mahāmati in view of the fact that the date of Prajñākaragupta is to be assigned to the similar time, i.e. circa 800 87, as the date of Haribhadra-sūri 88, which is accepted as the upper limit for that Nyāyâvatāra.
8. Is has been frequently suggested that the structure of NA is not intact, or that some of the verses of the text are interpolations. As a matter of fact, if we analyse all secondary literature written on NA, we see that reservations have been occasionally expressed about the genuineness of perhaps half of all the verses of NA! Recently a similar suggestion has been voiced also by BHATT (2000), who drew our attention to a number of verses which may imply, in his opinion, that they were not originally an integral part of NA. On subsequent pages I shall try to evaluate such arguments and discuss the place of the spurious verses in the general structure of NA.
8.1. We should approach with special caution, as BHATT (2000: 73) warns us, the verses of NA 8-9: 'However, the original text of the NV does not appear to be intact. NV v. 8-9 describing śābda pramāņa have almost similar expressions, e.g. drsțeștāvyāhata- (v. 8a); adssteșta-virodha- (v. 9b); tattva-grāhita- (v. 8c); tattvopadeśa- (v. 9c)
87. See STEINKELLNER-MUCH (1995: 74). 88. Cf. BALCEROWICZ (2001a: xxxiv).