3 08 The N)'aya- Vaifeika Philosophy [cn. the commentary NyayapradiPa, Saptapadiirtlzi of Sivaditya, Tiirk£karakl1. of Varadaraja with the commentary Nlka?z!aka of Mallinatha, Nyiiyasara of Madhava Deva of the city of Dhara and iVyiiyas£ddlziintamalijari of J anakjnatha BhaHacarya with the Nyaya11lailjarisara by Yadavacarya, and Nyiiyasiddhlilltadipa of Sasadhara with Prabha by Se!;'anantacarya. The new school of Nyaya philosophy known as Navya-Nyaya began with Gangesa U padhyaya of MithiIa, about 1200 A.D. Gangesa wrote only on the four pramaas admitted by the N yaya, viz.pratyak!;'a,anumana,upamana,and sabda,and not on any of the topics of N yay a metaphysics. But it so happened that his dis- cussionson anumana (in ference) attracted unusually great attention in Navadvjpa (Bengal), and large numbers of commentaries and commentaries of commentaries were written on the anumana portion of his work T attvaC£lltiima1j£, and many independent treatises on sabda and anumana were also written by the scholars of Bengal, which became thenceforth for some centuries the home of N yaya studies. The commentaries of Raghunatha Siromai (1500 A.D.), Mathura BhaHacarya (1580 A.D.), Gadadhara BhaHa- carya (16SOA.D.) and JagadlSa BhaHacarya (1590 A.D.), commen- taries on Siromai's commentary on Tattvac£lltiimani, had been very widely read in Bengal. The new school of N yaya became the most important study in Navadvjpa and there appeared a series of thinkers who produced an extensive literature on the subjectI. The contribution was not in the direction of metaphysics, theology, ethics, or religion, but consisted mainly in developing a system of linguistic notations to specify accurately and precisely any concept or its relation with other concepts 2 . Thus for example when they wished to define precisely the nature of the concomitance of one concept with another (e.g. smoke and fire), they would so specify the relation that the exact nature of the concomitance should be clearly expressed, and that there should be no confusion or ambiguity. Close subtle analytic thinking and the development of a system of highly technical 1 From the latter half of the twelfth century to the third quarter of the sixteenth century the new school of Nyaya was started in Mithila (Behar); but from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century Bengal hecame pre-eminently the home of Nyaya studies. See lIr Cakravartli's paper,J. A. S.B. '915. I am indebted to it for some of the dates mentioned in this section. ! l!vartinumiilla of Raghuniitha as well as his Padiirthatattvalliriipaza are, how- ever, notable exceptions.
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