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JAIN JOURNAL
Vol. XLII
No. 2 October
2007
Contributions of the Jains to the Vaiseșika Philosophy
Satya Ranjan Banerjee
The contributions of the Jains to different aspects of Indian culture, particularly in religion and philosophy, art and architecture, history and epigraphy, language and literature, cosmogony and cosmography, nay in all branches of human knowledge, are exceptionally unique. In the domain of Indian philosophy in particular, the Jains have surpassed all. It is a fact worth noting that while describing or establishing the philosophy of their own, the Jains have also contributed to the philosophy of non-Jain philosophies. By nonJain philosophies, I mean the philosophy of Sāmkhya-Yoga, NyāyaVaiseșika, Mimārsā-Vedānta, Cārvāka, Bauddha, Jaiminīya, Pāśupata, Kulācāryas and Trikamatas, Saiva vis-à-vis Sākta and many others. Many of these philosophies are lost today and have not survived till the present time, but their ideas and contents are preserved by the Jains in their respective treatises on philosophy. In this connection, I would like to mention that in the Indian philosophical context there were lively philosophical disputes in the second half of the 7th and the first half of the 8th century A.D. Kumārilabhațța, the great exponent of Mimāmsā philosophy attacked the Buddhist and Jaina logicians including Samantabhadra (first half of the 8th century) and Akalanka (720-780 A.D.), while Vidyānanda (775-840 A.D.) and Prabhācandra (980-1065 A.D.) defended their co-religionists against Kumārila. A history of this episode is not written anywhere, but, if some of the scholars present here can undertake such a work, the lost history of a
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