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The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yasovijaya Gani: 73 piece of derisive slang about him: "Cursed is the province of Bengal, where there is the one-eyed Śiromani". I think that his teacher is as likely to have been another prominent Varanasi Naiyayika of the same period, Rudra Nyāyavācaspati. Rudra belonged to the family of a renowned Varanasi scholar whose views Raghunatha had criticised, Vidyānivāsa (as Rudra's brother, Viśvanatha Pañcānana, tells us). The antagonism between this influential family of Naiyayikas with strong ties to Varanasi and the followers of Raghunatha's new school is perhaps evident in Yasovijaya's attitudes.
At a later stage in his career, Yasovijaya began to write increasingly spiritualistic religious treatises, and I will shortly say more about these. According to the fullest biography of Yasovijaya we have to date, one of the decisive events in the process leading to this transformation was Yasovijaya's meeting with the poet Anandaghanaji. Before this turn towards the philosophy of the self, however, Yasovijaya had produced several of the finest works in Jaina epistemology, including the Jaina-Tarkabhāṣā and the Jaina Nyāyakhaṇḍakhadya, utilising the methods of Navyanyāya in a reformulation of Jaina epistemology. It is of particular interest to see how Yaśovijaya takes the Nyaya idea that a single object can have a variegated colour (citrarūpa) - for example, that of a single pot whose parts are both blue and red - and in particular Raghunatha's defense of this idea with the help of the new concept of non-pervasive location (avyāpya-vṛttitva), and how he carefully distinguishes this explanation of the way a single reality can have apparently mutually excluding properties from the Jaina explanation in terms of nonAbsolutism (anekantavāda). The importance of these ideas was not to be lost in the later works which will be my concern shortly, works in which a variety of ethical themes are explored within an anekāntavāda framework, including the moral and intellectual virtues worthy of cultivation, the nature of spiritual exercises, the idea of a spiritual path and its analogy with a medicine for the soul, and the concept of that self for the benefit of which all these ideas are developed.
