an intellectual champion who commanded the respect of followers and rivals.
Hindu “philosophy” was in the shade of Buddhist philosophies in this period
because its inchoate tendencies considerably exceeded the upper limits of the
law of small numbers. A proto-Samkhya existed in the form of various con-
cepts which were mixed with others in popular works such as the Mahab-
harata.^39 Mimamsa consisted in a number of very specific textual interpreta-
tions of the meanings of words in the Vedas, not as a coherent philosophy at
an explicit higher level of abstraction. Badarayana’s Brahma-sutras were just
one commentary among others on the grab bag of traditional texts that
constituted Brahmanical education. The Upanishads had not yet been reduced
to a canonical set of 11 or so; in fact more than 100 Upanishads were
recognized, and they continued to be written as late as 1500 c.e. (Nakamura,
1973: 77). And within the Upanishads, as we have seen, there were dozens of
philosophies, none worked out in any depth. All this material so strained the
law of small numbers that it made no very definite impact on the attention
space. The creation of Hindu philosophies was a paring down to a small
number of positions, and a sharpening into an explicit level of abstraction and
systematization in the battle against Buddhist philosophies. From here date the
higher levels of sophistication in Indian philosophy, comparable to the cumu-
lative generations of European intellectual chains.
I will treat clumps of Hindu and Buddhist schools together as they mutually
shaped one another.^40
The Dialectic of Nyaya, Buddhist Logic, and Epistemology
The Intersectarian Theory of Argument. The Nyaya-sutras appeared around
100 c.e., and reached their mature form sometime around the lifetime of Na-
garjuna or shortly after (EIP, 1977: 4). Nyaya is usually translated as “logic,”
but its contents are a good deal broader than the Aristotelean and Megarian
logic which dominated in the West. Early Nyaya consisted in classifying modes
of knowledge, including a description of the bodily senses, and of the compo-
nents of a debate. Extensively treated are various kinds of invalid debating tac-
tics such as sophistries, caviling, and quibbling, all of which gives the impres-
sion that the sutras arose as a kind of rule book for judges in awarding victory
and defeat.
Included is a relatively brief treatment of what looks like a five-step syllo-
gism: (1) to prove there is fire on the mountain; (2) because there is smoke;
(3) for example, as in a kitchen; where there is no fire, as in a lake, there is
no smoke; (4) the mountain has smoke; (5) therefore there is fire on the
mountain. The work of argument is packed into steps (2) and (3), called the
“reason” and the “example.” The principles which are implicitly or explicitly228 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths