Talk:Nyaya:Some Stories and Some Arguments
By Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swami
Gaṅgeśa Miśropādhyāya deals with 64 methods of logic in his Tattvacintāmaṇi. Since we were taxing our brains with philosophical questions, let me tell you a story — the story of Gaṅgeśa.
Gaṅgeśa was dull-witted in his youth. He belonged to a kulīna Brāhmaṇa community of Bengal. Kulīna means one from a good kula or clan. It was a custom in Bengal to give away a number of "inferior" Brāhmaṇa girls in marriage to young men born in kulīna families. A kulīna would sometimes take more than fifty wives. Gaṅgeśa had only one wife and he lived with his in-laws. Who would give away more than one girl in marriage to a dull fellow?
Bengalis eat fish. Six months in a year the whole land is inundated. There is no place then to grow vegetables. So during these months Bengalis eat fish. In the eastern parts of Bengal fish is called jala-puṣpa and regarded as a vegetable.
Fish was regularly cooked in the house of Gaṅgeśa Miśra's in-laws. People would call him "Gaṅgā". Since he was slow-witted he was thought to deserve only the bones of fish at mealtime. Others were served the flesh and everybody would make fun of him. Gaṅgeśa, unintelligent though he was, could not stand it any more. One day he ran away from home, went to Kāśī without telling anyone. Nobody bothered about it at home. "Let the stupid fellow go wherever he likes,” they told themselves.
Many years passed. One day, Gaṅgeśa returned home. People thought that he must still be an idiot. When he sat down to eat he was as usual served the bones of fish. Thereupon Gaṅgeśa exclaimed: Na'haṁ Gaṅgā kintu Gaṅgeśa Miśraḥ — "I am not Gaṅgā but Gaṅgeśa Miśra." Were he still the dim-witted Gaṅgā of the past it would have been all right to serve him the bones. Now there is a Miśra tagged on to his name. It meant that he had returned home with a qualification or a title, that he was now a learned man. The message was brief but clear.
The in-laws realised that Gaṅgā was now a great man. It was the same Gaṅgeśa Miśra who later wrote the Tattvacintāmaṇi. Many have written commentaries on it. The one by Raghunātha Śiromaṇi is called Dhitti. It was after his time that the title Śiromaṇi came into use. Gadādhara has written a big tome to comment on ten sentences of Tattvacintāmaṇi, and not one sentence of it is superfluous. If a student reads five arguments presented in Gadādhari (Gadādhara's work) he would become a wise man; if he studies ten, he would be wiser still. Prāmāṇya-vāda is dealt with in it and it is believed that he who studies it will be brighter than all others. Gadādhari is still read by students of logic.
To explain prāmāṇya-vāda is to tax one's brain. But during the time of our Ācārya even parakeets, it is believed, were capable of discussing it. (Arguments about pramāṇas is pramāṇa-vāda.)
Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda went to Mahiṣmatī, the home town of Maṇḍana Miśra, where he happened to see women carrying water to their homes from the river. He asked one of them about Maṇḍana Miśra's house. In that city even ordinary women were learned. So their reply to the Ācārya's question came in verse. Here is one of the stanzas from it:
Svataḥ pramāṇam parataḥ pramāṇam Kiraṅganā yatra ca saṅgiranti Dvārāstha nidantara sanniruddhāḥ Jānīhi tan-Maṇḍana-pāṇḍitaukaḥ
From such incidents we know how wrong it is to say that in olden days only men in India were educated and that the women were condemned to remain unlettered. Not only females of the human species, even birds — in the present case "young parakeet women" (kiraṅganās) — discussed philosophy. “When you come to the doorstep of that house where the female parakeets discuss svataḥ-pramāṇa and parataḥ-pramāṇa, know that house to be that of Maṇḍana Miśra,” is what the women said to Śaṅkara.
Svataḥ-pramāṇa and parataḥ-pramāṇa are part of the prāmāṇya-vāda I spoke to you about earlier. Let us now try to have some idea of this vāda.
An interesting story comes to mind. A Southerner went to Navadvīpa in Bengal to learn logic. Most of the logicians in the country were then in Bengal. This Southerner who went there was a poet. Through his poetry he had earned a small fortune. Tarka was too tough for him and he could not make head or tail of it. All his efforts to study it were in vain. In the bargain he lost his poetic muse and now he had also spent all his money. If he had retained his poetic talent he could have still earned some money. With the little poetic talent left in him he lamented thus: Namaḥ prāmāṇya-vādāya mat-kavitvaḥ pāhāriṇe — "I bow to prāmāṇya-vāda that has robbed me of my poetic talent."
Let us briefly examine the prāmāṇya-vāda which the parakeets were discussing.
When we see an object we form a certain idea of it. Some kinds of knowledge are right and some, wrong. When we see a piece of glass we may think it to be sugar-candy. This is wrong knowledge. Right knowledge is pramā, wrong knowledge is bhrama. Then there is saṁśaya-jñāna as well as niścaya-jñāna. Saṁśaya-jñāna is knowledge about which we have doubts and niścaya-jñāna is knowledge of which we feel certain.
Sometimes, though our knowledge of an object (as we see it) is wrong, we think it to be right. An example is that of glass being mistaken for sugar-candy. Then there is the case of our perception of an object being recognised to be wrong at the very time we see it. For example, a tree seen reflected upside down in a pond: this is apramāṇa. At the very moment of our recognition of an object we have two kinds of knowledge about it — pramāṇa and apramāṇa. What seems true to us at the very moment of our seeing an object is prāmāṇya-graha-jñāna; and what seems untrue at such a moment is apramāṇya-graha-askandhika-jñāna.
In bhrama too, as in pramā, there is pramāṇa-jñāna. That is why when we mistake glass for sugar-candy our knowledge seems pramāṇa.
When an object appears to be true (pramāṇa) or false (apramāṇa), is the perception subjective (arising out of ourselves) or objective (arising from the object itself)? If it is subjective it is svataḥ-pramāṇa; if objective, parataḥ-pramāṇa. The parakeets in Maṇḍana Miśra's house were discussing these two pramāṇas.
Whether our perception is pramāṇa or apramāṇa is not a subjective matter. It is dependent on the quality of the object perceived. It is only when we know its usefulness in practice that we can confirm whether our perception is right or wrong. This is the view of Nyāya — whether our perception is right or wrong is objective. The view of Maṇḍana Miśra and other Mīmāṁsakas is the opposite. Maṇḍana Miśra's view is this: certainty about jñāna is dependent on the jñāna itself. But that our jñāna is apramāṇa is dependent on the outside object. Prāmāṇyam svataḥ; aprāmāṇyam parataḥ.
The word vāda itself is nowadays wrongly taken to mean stubbornly maintaining that one's view is right. As a matter of fact, it truly means finding out the truth by weighing one's view against one's opponent's. It was in this manner that Śaṅkara held debates with scholars like Maṇḍana Miśra, and it was only after listening to the other man's point of view that he arrived at non-dualism as the ultimate Truth. Vāda means an exchange of thoughts, not a refusal to see the other man's point of view. To maintain that one's view of a subject is the right one without taking into account the opinion of others is jalpa, not vāda. There is a third attitude. It is to have no point of view of one's own and being just contrary: it is called vitaṇḍā.
Nyāya received a new impetus, particularly in Bengal, after the dull-witted Gaṅgeśa, having blossomed into a great intellect, returned from Kāśī — that is, from the 12th century onwards; and it came to be called Navya-Nyāya, navya meaning new. There is also another reason for this name. Gaṅgeśa and others who came after him belonged to Navadvīpa in Bengal. The area is now called Nadiad. Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya belonged to Navadvīpa. He was a great scholar, a master of many śāstras, and had the name of Kṛṣṇa always on his lips. He propagated bhakti, especially through bhajana (singing the praises of the Lord) as the path to liberation.
Nyāya holds that the world is real (not Māyā), that the Paramātman is different from the individual self. Even so, it was opposed to atheism and established the existence of Īśvara. Besides, it laid the foundations for the path leading us to Advaita.
Nyāya is an Upāṅga of the Vedas and is highly intellectual in character. Purāṇas come next in the fourteen branches of learning (caturdaśa-vidyā) but they are dismissed by educated people as a product of superstition.