married woman. The exception to this
taboo on nudity is that some ascetics
believe nakedness symbolizes the
renunciation of all possessions and
the rejection of all worldly standards,
including shame. Few ascetics renounce
all clothing; some wear a loincloth in
public, rationalizing that one should not
mislead or scandalize ordinary people
who have limited understanding.
Nyasa
(“laying down”) A characteristic ritual
in tantra, a secret religious practice.
In the practice of nyasa, the person
performing the ritual identifies cer-
tain sounds, often in the form of seed
syllables (bijaksharas), with parts of
the human body, deities, and material
objects. This is done to create a series
of identifications between the macro-
cosm of the universe and the micro-
cosm of the body, such that actions in
the microcosmic ritual sphere will
cause results in its macrocosmic
counterpart.
Nyaya
(“method”) One of the six schoolsof
traditional Hindu philosophy, con-
cerned with the examination and vali-
dation 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 philoso-
phy, the Nyayas undertook the exami-
nation of knowledge not for mere
speculation, but to find a way to release
the soul from the bondage of reincarna-
tion (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 five-
part causal chain: pain, birth, activity,
defect, and wrong notion. Each of these
elements is caused by the one succeed-
ing 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 ele-
ments, space, time, mind, and selves—
and that whatever exists is both
knowable and nameable. The Nyayas
subscribe to the causal modelknown as
asatkaryavada, which posits that when
a thing is created, it is a new entity,
completely different from its con-
stituent 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 libera-
tion of the soul (moksha).
One of the unique features of the
Nyaya school is their belief in inher-
ence (samavaya), a weak relational
force that functions like a glue connect-
ing 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—Nyasa