Exploring an encounter between logical thinking and religious tolerance in India : Jayanta Bha TTa's reference to the sarvAgamaprAmANya-vAda

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Indian culture has been marked by the tremendous power to include a great variety of heterogeneous elements. This tendency of inclusivism is also discernible in the writings of NyAya Philosophy in which logical thinking and pluralistic world view are stressed. Among important thinkers in this context is Jayanta (=J), a poet philosopher of NyAya (the latter half of the ninth century). The central research topic is to investigate the views referred to in his NyAyamaJjarI (=NM), that all religious traditions are authentic (sarvAgamaprAmANya-vAda). The main results are as follows.(1)Scholars have wondered why J refers to those views without refuting them in spite of his strong denial of the validity of any anti-Vedic religion. My tentative answer is that J was probably aware that his arguments for the justification of the orthodox Hindu religions would not be fully convincing to anti-Vedic people, whereas he did not want to be too dogmatic and conservative.(2)The concept of "the approval by mahAjana" plays an important role in J' s justification of the Vedas, though the meaning of the word "mahAjana" should be clarified. G. Chenparathy asserts that in NM the ambiguity of that term persisted, the quantitative aspect ("a great many people") being stressed. I have shown that J seems to understand the "mahAjana" in the qualitative sense only ("great or respectable people") as far as the explicit meaning is concerned.(3)For a future extension of the present research, I have translated the substantial portion of the codanA-section of the ZlokavArttika in which the early stage of the svataHprAmANya-theory is found.(4)As a tiny step toward reconstruction of the early NyAya system of logic, I examined the relevant materials to see whether or how the concept of liGgaparAmarza is linked with the explanation of the meaning of upanaya in the NyAya's five-membered syllogism. Moreover, the detailed study was made of the precise meaning of the "six tarkas" (SaTrarkI) in NM.