Vaishali Institute Research Bulletin 1

Author(s): Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Research Institute of Prakrit Jainology & Ahimsa Mujjaffarpur

Page 141

130
VAISHALI INSTITUTE RESEARCH BULLETIN NO, I
the affirmation or denial of the remaining attributes. But when such an assessment is made categorical and commits itself to that particular aspect as the whole truth and denies the possibility of other attributes, it turns out to be wrong assessment, a false and fallacious naya (nayābhāsa). Thus the Naiyāyika and the Vaišeşika are the advocates of naigama naya which takes stock of the plurality of the phenomenal world as real facts and place them under different categories. The Vedāntist and also the Samkhya philosopher to some extent are the advocates of the second naya. The positivist and the materialist together with their unthinking blind followers among the unenlightened mass advocate the third naya and assess reality in its light. The Buddhist fluxist is the protagonist of the fourth naya. All these philosophers are guilty of false assessment, guided as they are by their exclusive approaches. These assessments should not be called instances of true naya which takes note of one aspect of a real for the sake of convenience and on account of limited equipment. They are true to the extent of the portion of reality they envisage. But they become false aberrations when the slice of reality envisaged by each of them is dogmatically and peremptorily erected into the whole truth with the implicit or explicit denial of the truth of the remaining aspects. Let us now examine the different nayas or rather their aberrations one by one.
The naigamanaya as pursued by the Nyaya-Vaiseșika school has been given a wrong twist. From the sameness of the individuals in respect of being they deduced existence as their common character as the underlying unity of things. And they also take stock of particularities and special features as contradistinguished from existence and other universals. Thus, for instance, the tree-universal is affirmed to be the common property of all individual trees and the individualities of the different species of trees--the oak, the mango, the palm etc.--constitute the distinctive features which distinguish them from one another. The aberration of the naya takes place when the universal and the particular are taken apart from one another as independent traits, mutually exclusive. But in actual experience we never find them as dichotomized. They are held together as inseparable facts. A universal without particulars is a mere abstraction and the particulars without the universal are apt to fall apart. So their asserton that these two should not be mixed together, each having an exclusive character, is a wrong evaluation. Moreover a universal has no causal efficiency of its own. It is a particular cow which yields milk and not universal cowhood. Again when a man is ordered to gather fuel by cutting a tree, he cuts any tree he finds convenient for the purpose of the fuel. He does not cut all the trees which fall under the universal