Fragments of the Early Nyaya School of Philosophy

The early school of Nyaya, as one of the six orthodox Hindu philosophies, is mainly represented by the four main preserved commentaries and sub-commentaries on the school`s founding text, the Nyayasatra, which is ascribed to the sage Akshapada (? 2nd century CE) and was probably finalized in its classical form by anonymous redactors around 400 CE. There must have been a considerable corpus of other works within the Nyaya tradition written during the second half of the first millennium that have not survived. We know for example that the Nyayabhashya was commented on by a number of early Naiyayikas of whom only their names, titles of works, or fragments have survived in the philosophical literature. An analysis of the fragments and doxographies would be highly important, since relevant developmental steps of the system`s ideas are often documented only indirectly by the four major commentaries. These basic ideas often seem to be related to authors whose works are lost. This assumption is substantiated by the fact that such ideas are often referred to in the works of authors of opposing schools and systems. The great Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti (600-660), for example, quotes many lost Nyaya works in the polemical sections of his Vadanyaya, as does Shantarakshita in his commentary thereon. As another example, it has been shown that Jayantabhatta, a Naiyayika of the ninth century, bases his work on two Nyaya branches that are not directly founded on the extant commentaries of Pakshilasvamin and Uddyotakara. Accordingly, it is clear that lost Nyaya works were important for the history of the philosophical development of Nyaya before Jayantabhatta. The aim of the project is to make a first attempt at comprehensively collecting and analyzing the Naiyayikas` fragments of the period before Dharmakirti (as well as collecting fragments of texts by authors after Dharmakirti). The result of this undertaking would provide the first overall view of the preserved fragments and doxographies, allowing an attempt to reconstruct a history of the older Nyaya`s philosophy. The critical investigation of the fragments of this eminent period of Nyaya should also clarify the branching of the various traditions within the school. The collected fragmentary material of lost works should probably also shed some general light on questions of chronology, not only within the Nyaya School, but also on authors of other traditions who refer to this body of thought.

The aim of this project was to collect and analyze Nyaya text fragments, paraphrases, and allusions, mainly from the period before Dharmakirti. This undertaking has provided a first overview of these preserved fragments, which in turn has allowed a first step to be made in reconstructing the history of early Nyaya philosophy. A database has been constructed that includes not only newly discovered fragment material, but also fragments that have already been examined and dealt with in the secondary literature. This database not only aids their systematic categorization, but also allows the collected material to be accessed by the international scholarly community on the internet. The database`s collection of quotations, paraphrases, etc. currently contains approximately 380 complex entries. In addition to many anonymous and/or uncertain "quotations" from so-called lost works, the collection contains fragments of works by more than thirty Nyaya and Carvaka authors, as well as other fragmentary material from the early period of Indian philosophy. In the course of the work, the interactive database was developed and improved. It was, for instance, augmented with a bibliography of primary and secondary literature about the epistemological-logical and dialectic tradition in Indian philosophy, including supplementary material on this topic (currently approximately 9,000 entries). To date, thirty-eight international scholars have access to the database. The next step in realizing a comprehensive collection of fragments of Indian philosophy involves a follow-up project with the title "Fragments of Indian Philosophy," which was approved in December 2011 by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (Project No.: P24160). In connection with the various international collaborations involved in this project, a "Joint Seminar" (Japan Austria) has been organized by scholars at Tokyo University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Funding has been approved by the FWF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The title of this conference is "Transmission and Tradition. The Meaning and Role of `Fragments` in Indian Philosophy." It will be held at Shinshu University, Matsumoto. An article about this project for the general public was published in the Austrian journal Universum (November 2011, p. 96).