the intermediate levels of truth ascending to the undifferentiated Brahman (EIP,
1987: 29–32; EIP, 1977: 453). From now on, Samkhya was a passive tradi-
tion, surviving at the hands of commentators who stressed its compatibility
with the dominant schools. Mimamsa, too, dried up as a creative school. First
Prabhakara and Mandana’s branches were driven out by Kumarila’s Bhatta
Mimamsa, but even the latter became static, no longer engendering any crea-
tivity in later generations. Mimamsa had occupied the ultra-realist niche in
intellectual space. Its rival in that slot, Nyaya-Vaisheshika, was the only Hindu
school which remained creative outside the Vedantic camp after the rise of
Advaita; while the other darshanas were fading and syncretizing, Nyaya went
on the offensive against the new philosophical dominants, and later, shedding
Vaisheshika metaphysics, produced a massive technical reform in its own ranks
in the form of Neo-Nyaya.
After 1000 came an upsurge of new conflicts in the Vedantist camp. The
topics were theist and dualist challenges to Advaita monism, together with a
sharpening of logical tools and their incorporation into the metaphysical-theo-
logical battles. A dress rehearsal for this set of conflicts had taken place several
generations earlier in Kashmir, encapsulated largely in Shaiva sectarianism.^62
In both cases an initial impetus came from logicians. We see this in the network
patterns and the battle lines of the debates, and also in the gradual permeation
of logical techniques into the sectarian philosophies. The inner politics of
Indian philosophy after the late 800s was in large part driven by the struggles
and mutual adjustments of Nyaya and Vedanta.
Nyaya logicians were the most cosmopolitan of the philosophical schools,
with close counterparts among the Buddhists and Jainas, and a good deal of
exchange across the lines. This distinctive niche within the larger intellectual
community kept Nyaya immune to the Vedantin dominance which destroyed
the other Hindu schools, and gave it the élan to launch a counterattack. Nyaya
had already been involved in a long debate with the Buddhists over ontological
issues. In conflict with Buddhist nominalism and its doctrine of the unreality
of aggregates, Nyaya and Vaisheshika formed a realist united front; across the
generations, this realist position became increasingly extreme, defending the
reality of substances, relations, and indeed all language categories as corre-
sponding to real entities of the world. As philosophical discourse expanded the
categories of argument, Nyaya-Vaisheshika assimilated them to the position
that everything could be treated as on the same level as everyday objects
perceptible by the senses; inherence, for instance, it treated as a kind of glue
which exists eternally in the universe (Halbfass, 1992: 38; Stcherbatsky, 1962:
1:25). This ontology was the opposite of Advaita with its transcendental
monism, anti-conceptualism, and doctrine of world illusion. As Advaita took
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