غانغيشا

الأعمال

• نحو 1325جوهرة التأمل في الحق (تاتفاتشينتاماني)

  النص المؤسس للنيايا الجديدة، منظَّم بحسب وسائل المعرفة الأربع؛ وقد شكّلت لغته التقنية الدرس الهندي قرونًا.

الموقف

The Tattvacintamani is arranged by the four means of knowledge – perception, inference, comparison and testimony – but its centre is inference. Gangesha tested many definitions of pervasion (vyapti), the invariable relation between reason and inferred property, rejecting them one by one before giving his own. To do so he refined a technical language of qualifiers, qualificands, relations and “limitors” (avacchedaka) that could state exactly which property, under which description and in which relation, is meant. He defended Nyaya realism against the Advaitin critic Shriharsha and against Prabhakara Mimamsa. Raghunatha Shiromani and the logicians of Navadvipa in Bengal carried his method on; it became the shared language of Indian scholarship.

الحياة والسياق

Gangesha Upadhyaya lived in Mithila in northern Bihar, the old centre of Nyaya learning, probably in the first half of the 14th century. Almost nothing else is known of his life; later stories about his youth are legendary. His son Vardhamana wrote commentaries on Udayana’s works. With a single great work, the Tattvacintamani, Gangesha founded the “new” Nyaya (Navya-Nyaya).

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Jewel of Reflection on the Truth (Tattvacintamani, c. 1325)