Nyaya-Vaisesika: Lip Service to the Vedas Part 2

I have earlier written about the intense contempt for logic which the Indian lawgivers repeatedly exhibit. The question is do they have any scriptural sanction in the Vedas for their denunciation of logic ? The answer is yes. In the Katha Upanisad (ii.9) Yama while explaining to Naciketas the Upanisadic view of the soul declares: 'Not by reasoning (tarka) is this wisdom (mati) to be attained.' The Maitri Upanisad (vii.8, translator Hume), while describing the heretics, makes an obviously disparaging remark about the tendency of logic to militate against scriptural authority:

"And moreover there are others who love to be a stumbling block among believers in the Vedas by the stratagem of deceptive arguments in a circle, and false and illogical examples. With these, one should not associate. Verily, these creatures are evidently robbers, unfit for heaven."

All this gives us some idea of the political climate in which the early representatives of the science of ancient anviksiki (Logic) are placed. What then can the logicians belonging to the Nyaya-Vaisesika schools do to save the fundamentals of their philosophy? There is the choice of open defiance of the ideological demands of the lawgivers. This is actually what the Charvaka materialists did. The result? They were branded as heretics, and although they were apparently tolerated for quite some time, as Charvaka attacks on hindu orthodoxy grew, there came a time when the Charvaka books on philosophy were destroyed and they were hounded out of society; this is what one can gather from the Mahabharata evidence and also the fact that we know for certain that there did exist Charvaka books on philosophy because we find references to such books in the writings of the non-charvaka philosophers of ancient India. To save themselves from being branded as heretics , like the Charvakas, and face possible persecution, the Nyaya-Vaisesika philosophers wish to avoid such a scenario.

Should the Logicians, then, surrender abjectly to the demands of the lawgivers? But this is as bad as renouncing logic altogether, since it would leave the logicians with hardly any distinctive position of their own.

It seems from the Nyaya Sutra and its earliest known commentary (of Vatsyayana) that our logicians try a third alternative. They wish to evade the censorship of the lawmakers by paying lip service to their ideological demands, notwithstanding the anomalies this creates for the Nyaya philosophy.

S.C. Vidyabhusan (in his 'A history of Indian Logic' pg 39) observes:

"It seems that the unfavourable criticism to which anviksiki had long been exposed terminated when, under the name of Nyaya sutra, it accepted the authority of the Vedas."

This is true, though to see the whole truth we have to see in some details how exactly the Nyaya sutra accepts the authority of the Vedas.

(to be continued)