142540 SE Udayana, founding father of Navya Nyaya, as a commentator (2021S)

The great logician Udayana, mostly called reverentially Udayanācārya, is rightly considered the founding father of Navya Nyāya by many Indian and non-Indian scholars and played a crucial role in the defense of the authority of the Nyāyaśāstra against the powerful Buddhist epistemologists, which constituted a major inner or intellectual motivation of the classical and early medieval commentators on the Nyāyasūtra whose works have been preserved as well as of the authors of independent Nyāya treatises such as Bhaṭṭa Jayanta and Bhāsarvajña. The frequent references by Buddhist authors of this period to other, now lost commentaries allow the inference that their authors as well participated in this defense. This fruitful controversy reached its culmination in the early medieval period, in the eleventh century. Now the debate is for the first time conducted in truly independently designed treatises, foremost those composed by Udayana. Udayana was obviously dissatisfied with the many commentaries and sub-commentaries on the Nyāyasūtra which were after all formally and structurally bound by the given, partially very archaic formulations and argumentation of their root text(s), and no longer convinced about the effectiveness of works belonging to this genre when the logically impeccable establishment of the central metaphysical presuppositions of the Nyāya tradition against the formidable Buddhists was concerned. We therefore have Udayana’s famous treatises establishing with a strictly logical and terminologically systematic approach the existence of an individual and permanent Self (ātman) and of an omniscient eternal creator-god, respectively, namely, the Ātmatattvaviveka and the Nyāyakusumāñjali. Additionally, in two small works, the Lakṣaṇamālā and the Lakṣaṇāvali, he presents exhaustive definitions pertaining to the central topics of the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika doctrinal edifices.
However, Udayana also devoted himself to writing a commentary on Vācaspati Miśra’s commentary on the Nyāyavārttika, the Nyāyavārttikatātparyaṭīkā (NVTṬ); this occurred demonstrably – and significantly – after he had completed his own independent treatises. The Nyāyavārttikatātparyapariśuddhi (NVTP) or Nyāyanibandha, even though primarily a commentary on the NVTṬ, occasionally also relates directly to the two other, earlier works of the so-called Nyāyacaturgranthikā and to the Nyāyasūtra itself. Beyond that, it contains longer independent deliberations and argumentations on selected topics that especially demonstrate Udayana’s logical, terminological and stylistic–argumentative innovations. When it comes to the presentation and interpretation of sophisticated objections (jāti) and points of defeat in a debate (nigrahasthāna), however, which are treated in the fifth adhyāya of the Nyāyasūtra, Udayana decided to better write his own, direct commentary on the sūtra-s, the Nyāyapariśiṣṭa.
Moreover, Udayana wrote a commentary on what had somehow become the foundational work of the Vaiśeṣika tradition, replacing the Vaiśeṣikasūtra in terms of popularity, namely, Praśastapāda’s Padārthadharmasaṅgraha (PDhS), called Kiraṇāvalī (Kir). In this way, Udayana’s oeuvre reflects his perception of the close relationship of the śāstra-s of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika and their convergence in the middle of the medieval period.
In this seminar, we will be studying the following sample passages: NVTP p. 423, line 2 to p. 425, line 5 (relating to Nyāyadarśanam [ND] pp. 697–698), and NVTP p. 430, line 19 to p. 431, line 7 (relating to ND pp. 697–714); Kir p. 53, line 24 to p. 56, line (on the initial sections 48 to 54 of the PDhS on the element wind [vāyu]) and, if the available time will allow it, Kir p. 170, line 3 to p. 171, line 8 (on the initial sections 211 to 212 of the PDhS on cognition [buddhi] as a quality).