Nyaya rescued the crucial concept of distinctness, defining it as a particular
type of mutual absence between entities. The hallmark of the school was to
produce extremely complicated negative definitions for every part of the syllo-
gism; ‘smoke’ is rendered “the counterpart of the absolute non-existence of the
smoke” (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:482; 52). Neo-Nyaya appropriated the negative
theme of the now-defunct Buddhist logic; once the rival of Nyaya realism, it
was now pressed into service against monist inexpressibility in much the same
way that Dignaga countered Nagarjuna.
The end result was to cut Neo-Nyaya loose from its longtime realist partner.
It no longer carried the old alliance with Vaisheshika; instead it produced
its own complex new theory of space and time. The last and most radical
leader of Neo-Nyaya, Raghunatha Shiromani in the late 1400s, underscored
the independence of the logic school from its old ally by critiquing Vaisheshika
atomism. Raghunatha added new primitive terms to the Nyaya system of reals
and reformulated the problem of ontological reduction. The traditional theory
of universals, which Naiyayikas had treated as something like the “natural
kinds” of Western philosophers in the mid-1900s, was no longer seen as the
natural cutting point of the universe; Raghunatha’s system became closer to
nominalism.^67
Neo-Nyaya became something like the European logical positivism of the
early 1900s in its concern for extreme logical formalism and strict rigor. By
the time Neo-Nyaya petered out in the 1600s, it had given up polemics with
other schools and become preoccupied with technical minutiae.^68 Its trajectory
toward ever-increasing formalism was more than a parochial development.
Those schools of Indian philosophy which had not repudiated intellectual life
for bhakti emotionalism were all becoming scholastic. The mainstream Advaita
school, for all its doctrinal commitment to defending aconceptual reality,
developed its own complicated logical formalism as early as the 1000s; this
so-called mahavidya mode of syllogistic argument even influenced the practice
of dialecticians such as Shri Harsha, and was an object of debate in the Nyaya
school before it formulated its own roundabout methods in the form of
Neo-Nyaya (EIP, 1977: 646–652; Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 2:119–125). The
Madhva school, too, institutionalized in its own monastic order, and its maths
adopted the successive reforms of logic for their own purposes; the Ramanuja
school resisted for a while but eventually acquired its own logicians. By the
1300s, formalism had infected all the schools.
Scholasticism and Syncretism in the Decline of Hindu Philosophy
These centuries show a growing scholasticism throughout the field, rooted in
the routinization of studies in the maths, which turned even the hot religious268 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths