The Classical Indian Axiomatic

Abstract

I PROPOSE TO EXPLORE a topic hitherto neglected in the search for the foundations of Indian philosophy; an enterprise that has progressed markedly in the last few years with the rising interest in Indian logic and linguistics, and with the typological and structural approach exemplified by Potter' and Smart.2 The arguments of the classical philosophers rest on a small number of axioms which are frequently cited and are so generally known as to be easily supplied when tacitly assumed in a proof. But none of the philosophical darianas attempted to list its complete axiomatic, much less to justify it, and criticisms of opponents' axioms were made ad hoc and unsystematically. Systematic treatment of the general axiomatic considerably exceeds the bounds of this exploration. One would have to proceed text by text, extracting the axioms, formulating or reformulating them, and deciding whether to merge variants, to treat one as a corollary of the other, or to list both as separate axioms. One would have to collect and classify the contexts and uses, note the critical objections and defenses of each axiom, and plot the variations of axiomatic according to period, author, and school. The result would be inductively derived, historical, critical, and complete. As a sample, I have collected a list of axioms from NMgdrjuna's Madhyamaka-karikas,3 lvarakrsna's Sasihkhya-karikas,4 and garhkara's Brahmasiitra-bhasya.5 The three: authors are sufficiently different in thought and in period, and are important enough, to guarantee that the results, though tentative, will not be trivial.