Nyaya

(“method”) One of the six schools of
traditional Hindu philosophy, concerned with the examination and validation of the objects of knowledge. It
was the Nyayas who first developed and
codified the notion of the pramanas,
the means by which human beings may
gain true and accurate knowledge. The
Nyayas recognized four such pramanas:
perception (pratyaksha), inference
(anumana), analogy (upamana), and
authoritative testimony (shabda).
These ideas are accepted by virtually all
Indian philosophical schools, and are
the Nyayas’ major contribution to
Indian philosophy.
As did all schools of Indian philosophy, the Nyayas undertook the examination of knowledge not for mere
speculation, but to find a way to release
the soul from the bondage of reincarnation (samsara). The Nyaya Sutras,
attributed to Gautama, are the
traditional basis for the school. The
sutras begin by asserting that the
means of knowledge and its elements
can bring a person supreme happiness.
The text’s second sutra describes a fivepart causal chain: pain, birth, activity,
defect, and wrong notion. Each of these
elements is caused by the one succeeding it, and is eliminated with the
destruction of its cause. The primary
cause for all of this is “wrong notion,”
hence the Nyaya were concerned with
the investigation of the pramanas.
The Nyayas draw their metaphysics
from the Vaisheshika school, with
whom they become assimilated in the
early centuries of the common era.
Their philosophical perspective is
sometimes described as the “ordinary
person’s conception.” The Nyayas and
Vaisheshika are philosophical realists—
that is, they believe the world is made
up of many different things that exist as
perceived, except in cases of perceptual
error. All things are composed of nine
fundamental substances—the five elements, space, time, mind, and selves—
and that whatever exists is both
knowable and nameable. The Nyayas
subscribe to the causal model known as
asatkaryavada, which posits that when
a thing is created, it is a new entity,
completely different from its constituent parts. This causal model tends
to multiply the number of things in the
universe, since each act of creation
brings a new thing into being. It also
admits that human efforts and actions
are one of the causes influencing these
affects, making it theoretically possible
to act in a way that brings final liberation of the soul (moksha).
One of the unique features of the
Nyaya school is their belief in inherence (samavaya), a weak relational
force that functions like a glue connecting various things: wholes and their
parts, substances and their attributes,
motions and the things that move, and
general properties and their particular
instances. For the Nyayas, the Self
(atman) is the locus for all experience.
Inherence connects all experiences—
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Nyasa
pleasure, pain, happiness, sorrow,
and so forth—to the Self. The philosophical difficulties with inherence—
particularly the notion that it is one
single principle and not a collection of
things—caused the Nyaya school great
difficulty. These assumptions were ultimately responsible for the rise of
Navyanyaya school, which attempted
to explain these relationships in a
more sophisticated way. For further
information see Karl H. Potter and
Sibajiban Bhattacharyya (eds.), Indian
Philosophical Analysis, 1992; and
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles
A. Moore (eds.), A Sourcebook in Indian
Philosophy, 1957.