Within ancient and classical Indian literature, sūtra texts are comprised of aphoristic statements that together frame a subject matter and present core tenets. The Nyāya-sūtra (c. 150 ce) presents the philosophy and methods of nyāya, “critical reasoning,” along with a well-developed epistemology and an ontology borrowed mainly from the Vaiśesika school, whose sūtras predate Nyāya’s by perhaps a century. This translation and commentary by van Bijlert is excellent within the restrictions the author imposes: not to look beyond, chronologically, the terse sūtras themselves along with precursors in pre-Nyāya literature, to determine what they mean. That is, van Bijlert professes not to be guided in his translations by the extensive classical Nyāya-sūtra commentaries, which stretch over more than a thousand years, not even that of Vātsyāyana Pakṣilasvamin (c. 450), on whose lucid prose all earlier translators have relied, I hazard. Rather, van Bijlert’s program is to turn to earlier work in the medical literature and the Vaiśeṣika-sūtra to illumine the text. This seems to be, then, an “originalist” reading, although van Bijlert never says so explicitly. Also, he does a good job of presenting modern scholarship, particularly that of the French indologist, Michel Angot, and his 883-page annotated Le Nyāya-sūtra de Gautama Akṣpāda, le Nyāya-Bhāṣya d’Akṣapāda Pakṣilaswamin: L’art de conduire la pensée en Inde ancienne (2009). This tome constitutes the best scholarly translation and study to date. Angot is not shy of citing commentators later than Vātsyāyana, but it is Vātsyāyana’s commentary that is the focus throughout the copious annotation, not the meaning of the sūtras divorced from that commentary, which is the oldest extant. So it turns out that van Bijlert profits from what later Sanskrit commentators say through secondary sources such as Angot, whom, to his credit, he often cites. Van Bijlert’s style is highly readable, his English colloquial and clear, and for a quick purchase on the sūtras in a classroom his book is a winner. Besides translating the sūtras and justifying his renderings by citing earlier texts, he makes some scholarly contributions in helping to decipher a few enigmatic stretches of text.
Van Bijlert’s translations have a religious-studies spin. He takes pains in his introduction and elsewhere to show the centrality of the idea of “salvation,” mukti, that is, “liberation (from rebirth),” in contrast to many scholars, prominently Bimal Matilal, the founding editor of the Journal of Indian Philosophy, who promote the view that the Nyāya-sūtra gives only lip-service to the religious goal, which, it is important to note, it terms apavarga, “beatitude,” and niḥśreyasa, literally, the “supreme good, ” in a usage something like that of “summum bonum” by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill (“From the dawn of philosophy, the question concerning the summum bonum. . .has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought.” Utilitarianism). The Nyāya-sūtra’s overriding interest is not religious but philosophic, with a particular concern to show how we know the things we know. Nevertheless, Matilal and company sell the religious dimension short. In addition to everyday epistemology and all sorts of ontological topics such as what the fundamental categories are, mereology, and realism about universals in the face of an onslaught of arguments from Buddhist nominalists, there is rational inquiry about a summum bonum. And van Bijlert makes some good points about this dimension of the text, although he overcorrects.
There is indeed bias on the part of Matilal and company. The great scholar presents in the inaugural issue of his journal something of a manifesto (October 1970):
The field of our contributions will be bound by the limits of rational inquiry; we will avoid questions that lie in the fields of theology and mystical experience. Our method will be, in a very general sense, analytical and comparative, and we will aim at a rigorous precision in the translations of terms and statements. Our aim will be to attract professional philosophers rather than professional internationalists.
However, the rational inquiry typical of the Nyāya-sūtra, whatever the topic, extends to its treatment of yoga and apavarga. To miss this is an error. Yet van Bijlert is also guilty of an imbalanced reading, bringing out the text’s concern with yoga, meditation, and a summum bonum—and the value of critical inquiry for soteriology—to such an extent that together these drown out the importance of other topics. The correction he makes is called for, especially since in its historical context the position that philosophy helps one stay on the yogic path stands in stark contrast to the view of those who see the rational program of Nyāya as a distraction for those seeking enlightenment. But the correction, or overcorrection, remains a distortion, to the detriment of the chance to learn and evaluate views on a wide range of topics discussed by professional philosophers writing in English.
In this way there are missed opportunities to engage a naturally interested audience of philosophers with analytic training. For example, van Bijlert translates the absolutely central term pramā as “valid cognition” and pramāṇa as “means to valid cognition.” Better would be “knowledge” and “knowledge sources,” because these are the words used in anglophone epistemology in examinations of “externalist” systems such as Nyāya’s. For his fellow sanskritists and longtime students of the classical philosophies, precise professional diction does not matter since such people would know the Sanskrit words and at least some of the debate that surrounds the concepts they express. (I refer to the controversy and theorizing that stretches over two millennia and that is addressed in literally hundreds of Sanskrit texts, largely in straightforward prose, we may note, as opposed to sūtras which are short and expressed in sentence fragments that sometimes present interpretative difficulties.) But, to look at the “valid cognition” translation from the perspective of a philosophy student learned in Plato, Descartes, Frege, and Bertrand Russell, “validity” is a term used in evaluation of arguments, suggesting a concern with inferences (which is way too narrow). And “cognition” is vague: is it a belief? does it contain a belief? is it episodic or standing? and so on. Knowing just the rudiments of the Nyāya theory, an analytically trained philosopher would, let me stress, likely pair “valid cognition” with anumāna, “inference.” But that is only one of the “knowledge sources,” pramāṇa, that the Nyāya-sūtra identifies (not to mention the volumes on this point in later Naiyāyika writing): perception, inference, analogy, and testimony are exclusively the sources of knowledge. The Nyāya-sūtra and ensuing tradition pay close attention to the nature of all four of these critters (processes) and in overview to the knowledge they generate as well as to the importance of their citation in critical inquiry (vāda) and debate, whether friendly or against historical opponents such as Buddhists and Mīmāṃsakas. “Valid cognition”—in other words, knowledge—can be the result of any one of the four. And, by the way, perception is more important than inference for how we come to know what we know, according to Nyāya. Each of the other three pramāṇa depend in one way or another on perception.
Much the same complaint may be lodged against the translation of ṡabda as “statement.” From the perspective of a student in a Sanskrit class, that’s not too bad. But in analytic epistemology there is a wealth of literature about testimony and its evidential value. Someone not in the know but familiar with the topics of analytic philosophy might easily sort “statement” in the direction of linguistics and philosophy of language whereas in the Nyāya-sūtra and company the focus is testimony’s role as a “knowledge source,” pramāṇa. Again, in a Sanskrit class, or even among attentive novices, van Bijlert’s “statement” is easily recognized as a technical term in Nyāya epistemology, meaning much more than what is done with a declarative sentence. So there is a context where “statement” would be acceptable. But a Sanskrit class is not exclusively the target audience. At least, van Bijlert does not delineate any such narrow group.
Other words rendered too literally and without attention to the overall theory include: prameya, not van Bijlert’s “object worth knowing” but rather simply “object” (or “object to be known,” if one insists on rendering literally the gerundive) in line with a comprehensive ontology and system of categories where everything known can be sorted; apavarga as already discussed; jāti, not just “rejoinder” but rather “misleading similarity,” within the theory of inference; and several others. But let me repeat that usually the renderings are colloquial and clear. The real problem lies in a failure to grasp the big picture, both in epistemology and category theory. Let me continue with the former.
The translation infelicities (though not bad for a Sanskrit class, mind you) are part of a larger failing, namely, to grasp the knowledge theory as a whole. Take, for example, the treatment of the “justification regress” introduced by Nāgārjuna in his Vigrahavyāvartinī (see Westerhoff, 2010). “What is your pramāṇa for your touted pramāṇa?” the Buddhist asks, as reported at NyS 2.1.17. Van Bijlert takes the Nyāya-sūtra answer at NyS 2.1.19 to be a variety of foundationalism where the foundations are (in the words of A. J. Ayer) “basic propositions,” which are, so to say, self-warranted. (Van Bijlert doesn’t use these fitting and familiar words; “self-illumination” is his understanding of the answer.) That is terribly wrong (as brought out by Matilal, 1986, 57–65).
The correct position is that we are not usually called to justify our beliefs. Epistemological merit—the right to believe and assert some proposition p which a perception, inference, analogy, or bit of testimony has brought into awareness (without our thinking about it)—is the default position. If p is brought into doubt—the Nyāya-sūtra identifies five sources for reasonable doubt—then we consider the source or sources of p, whether p is the result of a pramāṇa, perception or any of the others. If a Nāgārjunite or anyone were to reasonably challenge the knowledge-generating of the pramāṇa we have identified, then, as NyS 2.1.19 says, the pramāṇa becomes an object to be known and certified, like a lamp that can be an illuminator and also be an object we can look at—and like using a nugget weighed on another scale to calibrate a scale brought into question. Default epistemological merit kicks in at every level of examination, so that the regress is not infinite but terminated when the opponent runs out of reasonable questioning. We have to get along in the world. Our attention turns to something else. This view is a far cry from the “self-illumination” and “self-warrant” theory (actually Mīmāṃsaka positions) that van Bijlert reads into the text. Furthermore, the default-warranted view of Nyāya ties in tightly with the school’s overall theory of justification, or certification, parataḥ-prāmāṇya, “shown by another to be knowledge,” as opposed to the svataḥ, “self-warranted,” theory held by rival schools such as Mīmāṃsā, which, as a philosophic school and tradition, is indeed its senior. But there is not only tight coherence among the parts of Nyāya’s epistemology but the parataḥ view is, because of our experience and forms of life, simply a better theory. Originalism has its limitations. Philosophy matters.
REFERENCES
Michel Angot, Le Nyāya-sūtra de Gautama Akṣpāda, le Nyāya-Bhāṣya d’Akṣapāda Pakṣilaswamin: L’art de conduire la pensée en Inde ancienne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2009.
Bimal Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.
Jan Westerhoff, The Dispeller of Disputes, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.