UC Berkeley

The present study collects, translates, and analyzes the surviving fragments of two lost Naiyāyika authors, Aviddhakarṇa and Bhāvivikta, principally as they have been preserved in the works of the eighth-century Buddhist philosophers Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. (The present study argues, without coming to a definite conclusion as yet, that there is strong evidence Aviddhakarṇa and Bhāvivikta are not two distinct authors but different names for the same man.) The fragments themselves often contain fascinating and idiosyncratic arguments but are also often difficult to interpret. Unpacking them requires close consultation of major Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika works, primarily the Nyāyasūtra, Vātsyāyana’s Nyāyabhāṣya, which is the direct source material for most of the fragments, Uddyotakara’s Nyāyavārttika, which often parallels the arguments in the fragments, and Praśastapāda’s Padārthadharmasaṃgraha, which clarifies much of the technical terminology tersely packed into the most difficult of the fragments. The majority of the fragments are preserved in Kamalaśīla’s Pañjikā, his commentary on his teacher Śāntarakṣita’s Tattvasaṃgraha. Śāntarakṣita invokes, and Kamalaśīla cites, Aviddhakarṇa and Bhāvivikta in chapters concerning cosmology (2), the self (7), momentariness (8), the Vaiśeṣika categories of substance (10), quality (11), and universals (13), and the epistemological issues of perception (17), inference (18), and the existence of other means of knowledge (19). The fragments, accordingly, cover an extremely broad range of issues and, so, serve as an occasion to consider a number of questions about the intellectual commitments of the early Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika community and various disputes between Buddhists and Naiyāyikas. Several of the fragments also derive from Aviddhakarṇa’s Cārvāka commentary, allowing for a discussion of the relation between Brahmanical philosophical traditions and the materialist Cārvāka philosophy. Finally, because the fragments are preserved in the Pañjikā, they make possible a thorough analysis of the structure and style of the Tattvasaṃgraha as a whole, as well as the way the Buddhists represent the many rival thinkers they cite. The present study mirrors the structure of the Tattvasaṃgraha, using the fragments as anchor points in a reading of the text’s overall engagement with Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, in order to argue that Śāntarakṣita organizes his work in a dialogical manner.