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198 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY more varied than it would otherwise have been. All the different shades of philosophic theory-realistic and idealistic
are found within Buddhism itself; and we have, so to speak, philosophy repeated twice over in India-once in the several Hindu systems and again in the different schools of Buddhism. The prominence which the Buddhistic schools acquired gradually declined chiefly under the stress of strengthening Hindu thought. To judge from extant Sanskrit literature, the first great onslaught, so far as the scholastic side of the teaching was concerned, came from Kumārila Bhatta (A.D. 700) and it was continued by Samkara and others with the result that the doctrine once for all lost its hold on the Indian mind. In regard to minor points of a purely technical character, controversies were carried on for some time longer; but from the twelfth century onwards the discussions of Buddhistic thought in the various Hindu schools became for the most part academic and unreal. For the history of this great teaching after that time, we should look outside India-in Tibet, China and Japan.
The literature bearing upon the later phase of Buddhism, which began to appear as early as the first or second century A.D., is vast; and we can refer here only to a small portion of it, remarking by the way that several of the works in Sanskrit have been lost. To take only the four schools (p. 183) to which we confine our attention here: The chief exponents of the Vaibhāşika views were Dinnāga2 and Dharmakirti. The former is usually assigned to about 500 A.D. His works, such as the Pramāna-samuccaya, in their Sanskrit form are not extant. The latter is known as an interpreter of Dinnāga and is anterior to Samkara. His Nyāya-bindu, which is a treatise on logic, is available, as also a very valuable commentary upon it by Dharmottara. Numerous quotations from the works of these two thinkers are found cited by Hindu writers. Kumāralabdha (A.D. 200) 3
Some of the works lost have in recent times been fortunately recovered in translations in Chinese and Tibetan.
See Nayana-prasadini on Citsukha's Tattva-pradipikā, p. 244 (Nirnayasāgara Press) :-Vaibhāşikāņām sutra-ksto Dinnāgasya. 3 BP. P. 156 n.
