The Nyaya Sutras: A New Commentary on an old Text

The Work attempts at reviving the age-old commentarial tradition of India in the changing context of contemporary philosophising which now accepts no national or civilizational boundaries. It also develops a new methodology for ‘interrogating’ the ancient texts and ‘understanding’ them in the light of the questions they pose and the problems they tried to deal with. The work takes into account the commentaries of Vatsyayana, Uddyotakara, Vacaspati Misra 1 and Udayana and tries to hgihllight the philosophical issues they were concerned with, and the differences betweetn them in the regard. It also takes note of the work of Jayanta Bhatta and Bhasarvajna and attempts to see the history of Nyaya in the first one thousand years of its history from Gautama to Udayana in a new way and suggests that the formulations and solutions offered by these thinkers be seen independently of the fact that they are generally considered as belonging to a particular school of philosophy, that is, Nyaya and not as thinkers concerned with philosophical problems per se. There philosophical insights, thus ‘freed’ would become available to the “Living Philosophical Thought” of today. The approach and the methodology, though exemplified in the case of the text of the Nyaya Sutras only, needs to be extended to other texts of the Indian tradition on that they may become a ‘living’ part of contemporary thinking in India and elsewhere.