140371 UE Readings in Selected Passages on Agama as a Means of Knowledge in Bhasarvajna's Nyayabhusana (2017W)

Contents

In the epistemology of the Nyāya tradition, analogy (upamāṇa) is counted as one of the four instruments we have to know reality, along with sense perception, inference, and verbal testimony. As enjoined in Nyāyasūtra 1.1.6, “upamāna is a means to know an object of knowledge, on the basis of common properties” (prasiddhasādharmyāt sādhyasādhanam upamānam). The stock example provided in literature is the knowledge of a previously unknown wild animal, called ‘gayal’, by means of upamāna: by hearing the sentence ‘a gayal is like a cow’ from a forest dweller, a city dweller knows that gayals and cows have properties in common; having directly seen cows, he is able to associate the property of cows when he encounters this unknown animal in the forest, and consequently associate the word ‘gayal’ to its name-bearer.

In mainstream Nyāya, upamāna is thus accepted as an independent means of knowledge. In his Nyāyasāra and Nyāyabhūṣaṇa, however, Bhāsarvajña (9th–10th century CE) argues that upamāna is nothing but a form of verbal testimony (śabdapramāṇa). While going against the mainstream tradition of Nyāya of his times, however, he devised creative arguments to show how his view does not actually deviate from Gautama’s original one. His peculiarly heterodox stance is quite intriguing, not only because it is a rare expression of open dissent against one’s tradition, but also because one would expect a reduction of upamāna to inference, rather than to verbal testimony.

Queries

• How reliable is the printed edition of the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (NBhū)?
• Why is upamāna accepted as an independent means of knowledge in mainstream Nyāya?
• Why is upamāna so rarely used in Nyāya literature, and yet anointed with an independent epistemological status?
• Were there ever other examples produced, besides ‘a gayal is like a cow’?
• What is the role of upamāna in Nyāya inferences? Is this related to the logical role of analogy in inductive arguments?
• Why could Bhāsarvajña not accept upamāna?
• Why does Bhāsarvajña explains upamāna as verbal testimony, and not to as inference, as others have done?

Activities and aims

During the course we will read and discuss the arguments in the relevant passages of the Nyāyasāra and Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (NBhū, pp. 417–427), with particular attention to the following:

• Refining reading skills of Sanskrit texts
• Learning about the nuances of inference and verbal testimony
• Assessing the philological value of the edition and the manuscripts of the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa.