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PAURANDARASUTRA
Eli Franco
A couple of years ago I had the privilege of reading the Tattvopaplavasimhaa Lokayata text-with Pt. Dalsukh Malvania. It is only appropriate, as a small token of my respect and gratitude to Pt. Malvania, to contribute a paper which is directly connected to what he taught me. I have chosen, therefore, to deal here with a Lokayata fragment as it appears in a Jaina source.
The Jainas, no doubt, have made a most original and important contribution to Indian philosophy. However, the importance of the Jaina sources goes far beyond Jaina philosophy itself. Their importance for the study of all other systems of Indian philosophy cannot be underrated, for in no other system is the purvapakṣa presented with such honesty and thoroughness.
Strangely enough, although modern research on the Lokayata school of thought was done exclusively by scholars who were interested in pramäṇasastra, their studies are mainly concerned with the Bṛhaspatisutra, while the Lokayata logicians are almost completely ignored.
It is well known that ever since Dinnaga, epistemological and logical problems came into the foreground of Indian philosophy. Every philosophical school had to respond to the new discoveries made by Dinnaga and his follower Dharmakirti, and the Lokayata school was no exception to this rule. The old Lokayata arguments which were convincing enough as long as inferences were based on simple analogies, could no longer be applied to the new, well-established inferences, which were based on universal concomitance (vyupti). In order to stick to the old doctrine according to which inference is not a valid means of knowledge, the Lokayatikas developed a new kind of self-destructive logic inferences which prove that no inference is valid.
In what follows I shall try to present three different interpretations for one of these inferences : the Paurandara-sutra. The sutra reads': pramāṇašyāgauṇatvād anumānad artha-niscayo durlabhah. "Determination of object through inference is impossible, because means-of-knowledge is not secondary."
The only one I know of who has tried to explain the Paurandara-sutra is Professor Solomon in her study of Bhatta Udbhata. Her explanation follows closely Vädi Devasuri's Syādvādaratnākara. "The nature of heru (reason), which gives rise to inferences is that it is paksa-dharma, attribute of the paksa (the minor term, or subject of the syllogism). Now, the paksa is of the nature of an aggregate of attributeand-thing: the total entity constituted of the thing and its attributes is called paksa. And if that is not ascertained, how can it be ascertained that the hetu is its attribute;.
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