Vātsyāyana's Commentary on the Nyāya-sūtra

Abstract

Abstract This book is a guide to Vātsyāyana’s Commentary on the Nyāya-sūtra. For those wishing to “travel” to the thought community of classical India to engage with one of its most important philosophical works, this book serves as a guidebook, map, and interpreter. Treated as a single hybrid text, the Nyāya-sūtra with Vātsyāyana’s Commentary is a major part of what we could loosely speak of as the Organon of classical India: a collection of works on epistemology, logic, and dialectics by Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain thinkers that governed intellectual inquiry in the subcontinent for more than a millennium. Vātsyāyana’s Commentary also provides sophisticated arguments for distinct positions in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and value theory that stand among the best contributions to world philosophy considered widely. This guide provides students and researchers with a distilled, accessible understanding of the major scholarly, historical, and philosophical issues that inform the Commentary, while unpacking its philosophical content such that it speaks to modern readers. It also illustrates the way the Commentary may serve as a lens to view the formative period of classical Indian philosophy.