Talk:Nyaya: Pramāṇas
By Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swami
The pramāṇas other than pratyakṣa and anumāna are upamāna and śabda. What is upamāna? It is knowing what is not known by means of comparison with the known. There is an animal called gavaya. We do not know what it looks like. It is like a wild buffalo: to look at it is like a cow, so it is said. We go to the neighbourhood of the forest and there we spy an animal resembling a cow, so we conclude that it must be a gavaya. Here we have recourse to upamāna.
Śabda-pramāṇa is verbal testimony, the pronouncements of the Vedas and the words of great men. When the scriptures speak of things that we do not know, their words must be accepted as authority. The nāyāyikas, or exponents of Nyāya, believe that the Vedas are the words of Īśvara. The words of great men who are wedded to truth are also verbal testimony.
These four pramāṇas are accepted in Kumārila Bhaṭṭa's school of Mīmāṁsā. To them he has added two more: arthāpatti and anupalabdhi. Thus there are six pramāṇas in all and they are part of the non-dualistic doctrine also.
Our śāstras give a clear idea of arthāpatti through an illustration. Pīno Devadatto divā na bhunkte. What does the statement mean? "The fat Devadatta doesn't eat during daytime". Though Devadatta does not eat during daytime, he still remains a fat fellow. How? We guess that he must be eating at night. There is something contradictory about an individual not eating and still not being thin. Here arthāpatti helps us to discover the cause of Devadatta being fat. Our guess that he eats at night does not belong to the category of anumāna. To make an inference there must be a hint or clue in the original statement itself. There must be a liṅga like smoke from fire, thunder from clouds. Here there is no such liṅga.
It is the same with upamāna. When we come to the conclusion that the animal we have seen is the beast called gavaya, it does not mean that we made an inference or anumāna. We did not recognise the animal by means of any sign but from the fact that its appearance tallied with the description we had been given.
The last pramāṇa is anupalabdhi. It is the means by which we come to know a non-existent object. I spoke about abhāva, the last of the seven padārthas according to Nyāya. Anupalabdhi is the means by which we know abhāva. Suppose someone tells us, "Go and see if the elephant is in the stable". We go to the stable to see for ourselves whether or not the elephant is there. We find that there is no elephant in the stable: to recognise such absence (non-existence) is anupalabdhi.
Arthāpatti and anupalabdhi are part of Mīmāṁsā and Vedānta, not of Nyāya. (However, anupalabdhi is mentioned only in the Kumārila Bhaṭṭa school of Mīmāṁsā, not in the Prabhākara School.)