over Buddhist turf and that religion faded, the Nyaya-Vaisheshika alliance
automatically lined up against its successor.
Naiyayikas from Uddyotakara in the 500s down through Shridhara in the
990s combatted the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness—the basis for reject-
ing the reality of aggregates—by arguing that it destroys the distinction be-
tween being and non-being. If each moment annihilates the last, is not annihi-
lation (or negation) another entity added to the thing annihilated? The issue
was a hot one in the last generations of important Buddhist philosophers.
Shantarakshita in the 700s countered that there is no combination of entities;
“the momentary thing represents its own annihilation” (Halbfass, 1992: 151;
Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:95). The arguments transferred readily to a Nyaya-
Advaita clash. Against the Nyaya-Vaisheshika inherence entity relating a part
to its whole, Shankara used an infinite regress argument paralleling Nagar-
juna’s critique of substance philosophies and Shantarakshita’s denial of rela-
tions. Shridhara in turn responded by declaring that inherence exists by its
self-nature, not as the product of relationships. The issue was to become a
long-standing puzzle space on which Nyaya could operate; later the Neo-
Nyaya school investigated in depth the concept of “self-linking connectors” in
an attempt to clarify reciprocal and non-reciprocal relations among identity,
dependence, and inherence (Potter, 1976: 122–128). The debate parallels West-
ern discussions around 1900 between Bradley and Russell about internal and
external relations.
In Kashmir, links between Buddhist and Hindu intellectuals were particu-
larly close. Here, during the last fading of the Buddhist outpost, we find the
upsurge of the new aggressive Nyaya, at just the time when the Shaiva ontolo-
gies were being created. The most important Nyaya thinker since the 400s was
Jayanta Bhatta, who founded a lineage in Kashmir in the late 800s. Jayanta
attempted to show that everything knowable can be defined and thus is subject
to formal argument. This was an explicit counter-move against Advaita, which
had argued that ultimate reality is indefinable. Since Shankara had placed the
path of knowledge higher than any other path, including faith and practice,
Jayanta argued that Nyaya, rather than Advaita, should be the core of Hindu
philosophy. This claim was made even more strongly by Udayana (mid-1000s),
considered the greatest of the Nyaya-Vaisheshikas, from their lineage head-
quarters at Mithila. Udayana explicitly subordinated every other position to
Nyaya; even Advaita was a preliminary stage for Nyaya, which he called the
“ultimate Vedanta.” (Halbfass, 1991: 56, 310; Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 2:51;
EIP, 1977: 10). Udayana now produced formal proofs of the existence of God,
as supernatural cause of the world, as standard of right knowledge and of
authoritative commandments. Nyaya became the upholder of a positive theol-
ogy against the non-conceptual reference point of the Advaita cogito.
260 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths