About a generation after Udayana, Shri Harsha launched an Advaita coun-
terattack.^63 He produced a detailed and comprehensive critique of empiricist
ontology and epistemology. He subjected to scrutiny the concepts in the Nyaya
armory, and in the Buddhist systems as well. ‘Being’, ‘cause’, ‘relation’, and
‘class concept’ were criticized as leading to inevitable contradictions. The
notion of ‘difference’ or ‘distinctness’ had been at the heart of Dignaga and
Dharmakirti’s logic; the relative non-reality of objects was covered by defin-
ing them as the absence of an absence, a jar as the absence of non-jars. Shri
Harsha refuted the very notion of ‘difference’, thereby setting up one of the
stock topics of anti-Advaita debate. Shri Harsha attacked not only Nyaya but
also the memory of the now departed Buddhists, concentrating on the non-
Madhyamika schools most remote from Advaita.^64 Key Buddhist concepts such
as ‘non-being’ and ‘invariable concomitance’ (the chain of dependent origina-
tion) were subjected to dialectical debasement. Advaita had built originally by
appropriating Buddhist shunyata, Nagarjuna’s aconceptualism, and the Mad-
hyamika levels of relative truth. Shri Harsha seems to have been attempting to
show that the advanced Advaita could burn down the Buddhist ladders by
which it had arrived at its position. In this Shri Harsha was not entirely
successful, for a stock claim of later Vaishnava opponents was to accuse
Shankara, and even Shri Harsha himself, of being Buddhists in disguise (Raju,
1985: 384–388; Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 2:125–171; Eliot, 1988: 2:73).
Shri Harsha was the first of a series of distinguished Advaita dialecticians,
who, not content with merely defending Advaita, took the offensive against
any concept wielded by their opponents. Shri Harsha and Chitsukha mustered
something like the arguments of Berkeley and Hume, Kant and Bradley. How
can there be knowledge of an object apart from the act of knowing it? To
assume an independent reality lands one in the contradiction of knowing the
object before one knows it. No one ever perceives a substance, but only groups
of qualities; and since qualities cannot act, how can there be action of objects
upon one another? The relation of substance and quality is incoherent; how
can a relation be related to its terms without infinite regress? The Advaita
dialecticians maintained one distinctive twist of meditation-oriented Hinduism,
that the “only reality is the self-luminous Brahman of pure consciousness”
(Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 2:126). For “everything that is self-contradictory pre-
supposes something that is not self-contradictory; it is self-contradictory with
reference to something,” the one point of ultimate if inexpressible reality (Raju,
1985: 388).
In the 1100s or 1200s, as the Vaishnava philosophers begin to carp at
Advaita from a renewed pluralist position in the Vedanta, another Advaita star
appeared. Chitsukha added to the list of concepts which Shri Harsha had
demolished: time, space, numbers, and qualities are equally unreal and self-
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