Introduction:

Founded by gootama or gautama, also known as akSapaada (550 BC), the nyaaya system is often clubbed with the vais'eeSika system of uluuka or kaNaada (600 BC). However, the nyaaya system has its own unique features and deserves to be treated as an independent school of philosophy by itself.

The nyaaya system has developed the topic of pramaaNa-s or valid means of knowledge in great detail and laid the foundations of Indian logic. Hence the names nyaayavidyaa, tarkas'aastra and aanviikSakii.

nyaaya literature: The nyaayasuutra-s of gautama (550 BC) is the basic text. 528 suutra-s (aphorisms, formulae) are spread across 5 chapters, each of which is divided into 2 sections. vaatsaayana (400 AD) has written a bhhaSya (commentary) called nyaayabhaaSya. udyootakara (7th Century AD) has written a nyaaya-vaarttika (sub-commentary) on the nyaayabhaaSya. vaacaspati (841 AD) has further elucidated this work in his taatparyaTiikaa. udayana (984 AD) has written taatparyaTiikaa paris'uddhi. He has also written another book called kusumaaMjalii. jayanta (880 AD) composed nyaayamaMjarii. gaMgees'a (1200 AD) wrote tattvaciMtaamaNi which lead to a modern and highly advanced school of nyaaya philosophy now well known as navya-nyaaya. navadviipa was the nerve centre of this new version which flourished in Bengal. annaMbhaTTa's tarkasaMgraha (1650 AD) with diipikaa as its commentary and visvanaatha's kaarikaavali or bhaaSaapariccheeda (1650 AD) with its commentary sidhaaMtamuktaavalii are other important works.

The 16 Topics: The nyaaya system is based on 16 basic padaartha-s or things in terms of which the whole system is developed. Here we attempt a brief summary:

1. pramaaNa: Means of knowledge, evidence. Nyaaya accepts four kinds of evidence. pratyakSa or direct perception is the first. Whole of science is based on experimentation, observation, inference and observation is nothing but pratyakSa. anumaana is inference or logical deduction. This is again at the core of all mathematics and science. The third is upamaana or comparison. Modern disciplines such as Pattern Classification, Machine learning, Analogical or Case Based Reasoning are all based on comparisons with examples, patterns or models built from such examples. Then comes s'abda or verbal testimony. How do you know The US attacked Iraq? Did you go there and see? Perhaps not. You relied upon the TV, the Radio or a newspaper report. You take them as trusted sources of information. Similarly, we quote the works of other experts and cite references to their publications when we do research. That means we accept certain journals or conferences as trusted sources. Even the courts of law accept verbal testimony by eye witnesses as valid means of knowledge and come to conclusions based on such knowledge.


2. prameeya: The thing to be known or proved, the Theorem. In the nyaaya system the prameeya-s are aatma (soul), s'ariira (body), jnyaaneeMdriya-s (organs of knowledge - eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin), viSaya-s (objects of these iMdriya-s like colour and form for the eyes), buddhi (cognition, jnyaana), upalabdhi (apprehension), manas (mind), prvRtti (activity), dooSa (mental defects such as raaga or attachment and dveeSa or aversion), preetyabhaava (rebirth), duHkha (suffering) and apavarga (absolute and total liberation from all suffering). It is only when we understand these concepts very well that we can overcome our ignorance and reach the ultimate goal of life. Constant s'ravaNa (listening to the scriptures), manana (reflecting on the same) and nididhyaasana (meditation) helps to reach the goal. The purpose of all the logic and reasoning is to help us to expose our ignorance and understand the truth correctly. The nyaaya school has thus come up with its own theory of knowledge.


3. saMs'aya: Doubt. If there is absolutely no doubt, if there are no contenders, if there are no alternatives, there is no need for any proof or logic. The question does not arise at all. Logical reasoning and proof are required only when there is saMs'aya.


4. prayoojana: Utility, use of the end result. Nobody wants to waste their time over things which have no real utility. Why waste effort on things of no value, things which serve no purpose.
   
   The modern mind seems to have forgotten this simple requirement. Ask a mathematician why he or she is doing mathematics and see the surprise and shock on his/her face! People do not seem to think beyond a step or two at a superficial level. It appears that all the thinking and research we are doing today is merely intellectual jugglery with the sole purpose of satisfying our intellectual curiosity, games played by grown up kids! There seems to be no deeper justification. At best, the aim is to help us somehow survive, live or just exist in this mortal world. Nobody seems to think beyond.


5. dRSTaaMta: Example. If we do not have a set of good examples and/or counter-examples, we are not even ready to dig deeper.


6. siddhaaMta: Doctrine.


7. avayava: Item of a syllogism.


8. tarka: Logical deduction, Reasoning, Proof.


9. nirNaya: Conclusion.


10. vaada: Argument leading to the truth.


11. jalpa: Argument for the sake of argument, just to somehow win.


12. vitaMDaa: Destructive, unhelpful criticism. It takes you nowhere.


13. hetvaabhaasa: Apparent but invalid reason. One must be very careful to avoid fallacy and confusion.


14. chala: Unfair reply.


15. jaati: False analogy. We often get misled in the wrong direction by taking the wrong example for analogy or by incorrectly interpreting its characteristics.


16. nigrahasthaana: A ground of defeat in debate.

The nyaaya Theory of Knowledge:

pratyakSa: The four pramaaNa-s, when properly applied, lead to pramaa or correct, valid knowledge but inappropriate application can lead to apramaa or non-valid, incorrect knowledge as happens if you depend upon your memory (which can fail), guess-work, or in bhramaa (erroneous perception, taking X to be a Y). Seeing is believing but seeing water in a mirage or seeing a snake in a rope lying on the floor of a dark room do not constitute valid observation. Hazy perception in an atmosphere of fog and mist, seeing through strained or sleepy eyes or eyes suffering jaundice will not be acceptable just as observations made through uncalibrated instruments, incorrect methods of taking measurements or inappropriate application of statistical inference will not be acceptable in modern science. Metals expand when heated and measuring the length of some object using a metal scale can only be considered valid when the temperatures are controlled. Thus great care is required in all observations to distinguish between valid perception and illusions.

nyaaya accepts feelings and emotions such as joy and sorrow experienced internally by the mind also as valid forms of pratyakSa. It is surprising that scientists do whatever they do for their own self satisfaction and intellectual curiosity but fail to accept feelings such as satisfaction as unreal and consider only the inanimate, inert material objects in the physical world as real! One must of course not react emotionally when trying to see reason and searching for truth. But to ignore and sideline all of our internal experiences in the mind is to reduce ourselves to dead matter like stones. Why all this gimmick then?

nyaaya also accepts extra-sensory, intuitive perceptions of spiritually highly evolved yoogi-s as pratyakSa. This is called yoogaja or yoogipratyakSa. If you were a person who has come in a time capsule from the remote past to present time and you were told that you can talk to people a thousand miles away using an instrument called the telephone, you would not believe it. But once you see it and get used to it, it looks so natural and you almost take it for granted. What we find it easy or difficult to believe, what we find possible or impossible, what we accept as logical or illogical, is to a great extent based on our own experience. If you are not a yoogi yourself, you will find it hard to accept what a yoogi says. Since most people on earth today are not yoogi's most people will find it difficult to accept. But truth is not a game of numbers. The entire world thought earth was flat at one point of time, right?

anumaana: You see smoke on the yonder hill. You conclude there is fire over there. You have not seen the fire. How can you come to such a conclusion? anumaana, literally knowledge which follows another piece of knowledge, is what we call a logical syllogism. From our past experiences, it has been observed that wherever there is smoke, there is fire, without exceptions. This is called anvaya. It has also been observed that there is no smoke where there no fire. This is called vyatireeka. Fire, the presence of which is to be proved, is called the saadhya. The smoke, which indicates the presence of fire is called liMga, hetu or saadhana. The hill is called the pakSa. A relation of invariable concomitance, called vyaapti, must hold between the saadhya and the saadhana for the syllogism to be valid. nyaaya scholars have made subtle distinctions and used terms such as svaartha and paraartha, puuravat and s'eeSavat etc. nyaaya has implications for current research in logic, reasoning, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence and allied subjects.

upamaana: upamaana or comparison, is the process of naming an object in terms of a description of its properties. A man who has never seen a gavaya, a wild cow, is told that it is a wild variety similar to the domestic cow that he knows well. If, subsequently this man comes across a gavaya in a forest, he can recognize it as one although he had never seen it before. The knowledge he uses to come to this conclusion is comparison or upamaana. In some schools of philosophy, upamaana is considered to be a variety of anumaana.

s'abda: Verbal testimony, assertion of a trustworthy source. It is called dRSTaartha if it concerns physically perceptible objects and adRSTaartha, otherwise. Statements in the s'Rti regarding God, soul, immortality etc. are thus s'abda pramaaNa.

s'abda or verbal testimony is revealed through natural language sentences and nyaaya discusses the logical structure of sentences in great detail. aakaaMkSa (expectations, for example a transitive verb expects an object), yoogyata (mutual fitness, absence of contradictions, for example a noun phrase signifying an edible solid object is fit to act as the grammatical object of the verb "eat"), sannidhi (proximity, for example, concordance, collocations, n-grams as we know them in modern statistical linguistics), and taatparya (intended meaning) are the basic qualities which define the logical structure and correct interpretation of sentences. Thus the nyaaya school has implications for current research in various branches of linguistics and allied subjects.

The nyaaya Theory of the Physical World:

nyaaya has taken the theory of the physical world in toto from vais'eeSika dars'ana which was developed chronologically before nyaaya. The physical world is a product of the four kinds of paramaaNu-s (atoms, basic elemental substances) of pRthvii (earth, solid matter), ap (water, liquid matter), teejas (fire, energy) and vaayu (air, gaseous matter) along with aakaas'a (ether) and the non-physical entities of kaala (time) and dik (space). After all physics is all about matter and energy set out in a framework of space and time, right?

iis'vara or God, the creator:

It is iis'vara who creates the physical world in keeping with the adRSTa-s and karma-s of the individuals. iis'vara is the ultimate cause of sRSTi (creation), sthiti (maintenance), and laya (destruction). However he is not considered to create the world out of nothing (which is impossible) or out of himself (how can he exist before creation?). Instead, atoms, space, time, ether, minds and souls are considered eternal - they are not at all created or destroyed. Creation is merely transforming, ordering or structuring these eternal substances into the world as we see according to the karmaa-s of the individual (Why should somebody be born as an ant, somebody as a buffalo, somebody as grass an somebody in human form? Is it all purely accidental or by chance alone? nyaaya says it must be according to what you deserve. God is the karmaphaladaata - giving rewards to the meritorious and punishing the wicked. Fear of the Law is not sufficient to keep people from committing sin, fear of God has proved to be much better). The physical world is a means, an instrument, to achieve the higher goals of a moral and spiritual nature. God is thus the nimitta (efficient cause), but not the material cause.

God is omniscient, endowed with eternal consciousness as an innate, inalienable attribute (not his very essence as in veedaaMta), he possesses perfect qualities like jnyaana (knowledge), ais'varya (lordship), yas'as (glory), s'rii (wealth and beauty), etc.

The nyaaya and vais'eeSika schools provide as many as ten proofs for the existence of God. The most powerful argument is that almost all the components of the world are inanimate, inert and insentient and the jiiva-s or individual souls of the living creatures are too very limited in knowledge and power. There must be a supremely intelligent agent behind creation. It is impossible for such a wonderful world to come into existence by pure chance. Did nature try zero, one, two, three, ..., eyes, in all possible locations over the human body (or inside it!), in all possible orientations, in all possible sizes, shapes and fine structure, and finally after a great deal of experimentation come to the conclusion that the present system of the two eyes we have is the best? There is no indication whatever in nature and evolution that blind, meaningless, foolish experiments are carried out. Every experiment of nature is supremely intelligent, wonderfully well conceived and superbly successful. Who's intelligence is all this? Just sit back and analyze the enormous complexity of even a single organ in the human body. The human brain has an estimated ten raised to the power of eleven nerve cells, each interconnected on an average to ten thousand others. Think of anything man made so complex. You think it will work? The more you study nature, any aspect of it, the more you will realize how amazing and supremely intelligent the whole world is. Just study the bone structures of various animals an you will convince yourself that only the most perfect engineer could have designed any of them, taking a thousand factors into account. It is strange that we keep studying the world all the time but never stop to think how all this amazing things could have come into existence.

jiiva-s or individual souls:

According to nyaaya, the jiiva-s are infinite in number, eternal, indestructible, all pervading. Consciousness is not an intrinsic attribute of jiiva-s, they get it due to the association with the mind. Mind is atomic in size. The jiiva-s experience the outside world when the mind is related to the outside world through the sense organs.

Life is full of pains and pleasures. We cannot have one without the other. nyaaya does not consider mookSa as a state of unbroken, continuous, complete bliss. It is rather simply a negation, a total and permanent absence of all sorrow and suffering. Attaining such a state of mookSa or apavarga or liberation is the aim of life. By persistent saadhana of s'ravaNa, manana and nididhyaasana, one can destroy mithyaajnyaana or false knowledge or ignorance. Then he will no longer be bandied about by passions and impulses which lead to sorrow, pain and suffering, both physical and mental.

Conclusions:

The nyaaya dars'ana shows clearly that India thought is not based solely on scriptural authority. The thoroughness of the system of logic and reasoning developed in the nyaaya system is worth more detailed study by all modern thinkers. Since the topic of discussion may be very different from the current hot topics in various disciplines, the readers may initially find all this a bit strange and new, especially those who have little idea about Indian thought. But there is certainly substance and truth that can be culled out and applied to current concerns in various disciplines, even if you are not interested in mookSa or liberation at this point of time.

In the west, after Aristotle nothing happened in logic for centuries together until the 18th century. In sharp contrast you can see from the references that continuous, uninterrupted developments have been taking place in India. Sanskrit is not a dead language and Indian traditional systems are as alive today as they have always been. The world is largely ignorant of India. That people do not know Sanskrit language is at best a sly excuse for their ignorance. Can we say today that we do not know English and so we will ignore everything that is published in English, live in our own closed world, like the proverbial frog in the well, and make claims of discoveries already known to others for centuries?

It is interesting to note how the modern mind has increasingly come to doubt itself and lay more and more emphasis on machines. Modern mathematical or symbolic logic is based on the assumption that human mind is unreliable, gets easily confused and the best way to overcome this limitation is to replace meaningful linguistic expressions with meaningless symbols, to replace semantics with syntax, and to completely take out the human element and make logic a purely mechanical process. It was the human being who had a doubt, it was the human being who sought out an answer, it was the human being who saw examples or counter-examples, it was the human being who formulated the laws of logic and it is finally the human beings who will be using the results of the processes of logical deduction. What purpose does it serve to eliminate the human being from the whole process and make it a dry mechanical process? No other animal seems to be as foolish as man, no other animal uses the best of its abilities to reduce itself to void, to annihilate its own kind. Why all the cry about automation? Don't we trust ourselves? We have infinite potential hidden in us, we are divine creatures, not sinners. Let us hope for a realization of this basic truth. Let us make the best out of ourselves. Let us not be carried away by technological advancements. Let us advance.