Udayana

Udayana (c. 975–1050, though some date him a century earlier) was the most important philosopher of the classical Nyāya school after its founders, and the thinker who brought Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika together into a single system. Living in Mithilā in northern Bihar, he wrote on logic, the self, perception and above all on God: his Nyāyakusumāñjali (“A Handful of Flowers of Nyāya”) is the classic Indian work of rational theology, presenting arguments for the existence of a creator God that are often compared with those of Aquinas. His Ātmatattvaviveka (“Discrimination of the Truth of the Self”) is a sustained refutation of Buddhist doctrines of momentariness, no-self and idealism, written at the moment when Buddhism was disappearing from India. He is often regarded as the last great figure of “old” Nyāya before Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya.

Works

Udayana’s main works are the Nyāyakusumāñjali, on God; the Ātmatattvaviveka (also called Bauddhādhikkāra, “Refutation of the Buddhists”), on the self; the Kiraṇāvalī, a commentary on Praśastapāda’s Vaiśeṣika text; the Lakṣaṇāvalī, a book of definitions; the Nyāyapariśiṣṭa; and the Tātparyapariśuddhi, a sub-commentary in the Nyāya commentary chain.

The Handful of Flowers

The Nyāyakusumāñjali begins by stating the opponents of theism: the Cārvākas, who deny everything unseen; the Mīmāṃsakas, for whom karma and the eternal Veda make God unnecessary; the Buddhists and Jains, who reject a creator; and others. Udayana then answers five objections — that there is no unseen cause of the next world, that the world could arise without a maker, that God’s existence is contradicted by other means of knowledge, that there are no means of knowing him, and that the means that exist are unreliable.

His positive case is summarised in a famous verse giving eight proofs: from effects (the world is made and so has a maker), from the combination of atoms (inert atoms must be joined at creation), from support (something sustains the world and will destroy it), from conventional meaning (someone established what words mean), from authority (the Veda, being reliable testimony, needs a reliable author), from scripture, from sentences (the Veda consists of sentences, which have speakers), and from number (the size of a dyad depends on duality, a quality that exists only in a cognition at creation — God’s).

The first is the heart of it: whatever has parts is an effect; every effect has an agent who knows its material, wants to make it, and acts; the world has parts; therefore it has such an agent, and since its materials include invisible atoms and karma, the agent must be omniscient. Udayana’s answers to objections — that God would need a body, that God’s purpose in creating is unclear, that inequality in the world makes God cruel — are ingenious: God creates out of compassion, according to the karma of beings, as a king rewards and punishes according to merit.

The Kusumāñjali is also an act of devotion. Udayana says that even for those who already believe, the study of God through reason is a form of worship (upāsanā).

Legacy

Udayana’s arguments became the standard Nyāya theology, and were taken up by later Naiyāyikas and Vedāntins. Modern philosophers of religion have compared them with the cosmological and design arguments of Aquinas, Leibniz and Paley, and with the objections of Hume and Kant. The Buddhist-Nyāya debate on God that his work completed is one of the richest exchanges in the history of the philosophy of religion.