218 = Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [November, 1905. 
logic is Pramanasamuccaya by Dignaga. The next work is Pra- 
mana-vartika-karika (or a commentary in verse on the above). 
Then follows Pramana-vartikalahkaéra, and so on. Jinendrabodhi’s 
excellent commentary on the Pramana-samuccaya, called Visalama- 
lavati-nama-Pramana-samuccaya-tika,! is also to be found there. 
Nyayabindu, Pramana-viniscaya and other excellent Buddhist 
works on logic are also preserved there. The Tangyur, containing 
all these wor ‘ks, has been brought from Gyantse by the Tibet Mission, 
and is now deposited in the British Museum, London. Nearly 
eighty years ago another set of the Tangyur was brought from 
Tibet by the late Mr. B. H. Hodgson. That set is now contained in 
the library of the India Office, London. These excellent and old 
works on logic lead us to conclude that the credit of having 
founded the modern Nyaéya must be attributed to the Buddhists, 
among whom there were numerous logicians such as iignaga, 
Dharmakirti, Dharmottara, Vinitadeva, Santabhadra, Akalanka- 
deva, Jinendrabodhi, Kamalasila and otners. These Buddhist 
writers had flourished long before the Brahmanic logician Gangesa 
Upadhyaya compiled his Pramana-cintamani. 
The circumstance which led the Buddhists to forsake the 
ancient Nyaya and to lay the foundation of a new system called 
modern Nyaya was due to the peculiarity of the religion which 
they professed. Having considered the sixteen categories treated 
in the ancient Nyaya to be redundant and some of them as mainly 
based on the orthodox principles of the Hindus, the Buddhists took 
up only one category, viz., Prama@na (evidence of knowledge), and 
treated it in such a way that the doctrine of evidence might be 
equally applied to the religious systems of the Hindus and Bnd- 
dhists. The attempt on the part of the Buddhists to divest the 
principles of logic from those of theology, metaphysics, etc., was 
the cause of the foundation of the modern Nyaya, otherwise called 
Tarka-sastra or Logic proper. 
As Pramana-samuccaya (Tibetan: ay RY mg sie) is the 
earliest-known work on the Buddhist Nyaya, 
a short account? of its author may be of 
some interest to the reader. Dignaga (Tib. Phyogs-glan 
SAV AIC ) the celebrated author of this work, was born in a 
Life of Dignaga. 
Brahman family in the south near the country of Kafici bordering 
on the city of Simhavakta, and acquired vast knowledge in all 
Tirtha systems. By Nagadatta the Pandit of the Vatsiputriya 
school he was admitted to the religious system of that school and 
! This work (together with the Tibetan version of the Nyaya-bindu-tika, 
Caudra-vyakarna and Tara stotra) has been kindly lent to me for six months 
by the Government of nel 
® Vide SQ Qua’ aa Qa" Pag-sam-jon-zang (pages 100-101), editea 
by Rai Sarat Chandra Das, Bahadur, C.I.E., and Lama Taranatha’s Buddhism, 
Schiefner, pp. 130-185. 
