Udayanacharya

Udayana
Religion	Hinduism

Udayana, also known as Udayanācārya (Udyanacharya, or Master Udayana), was a very important Hindu logician of the tenth century who attempted to reconcile the views held by the two major schools of logic (Nyaya and Vaisheshika). This became the root of the Navya-Nyāya school of the thirteenth century, established by the Gangesha Upadhyaya ("New Nyāya") school of "right" reasoning, which is still recognized and followed in some regions of India. He lived in Kariyan village in Mithila, near present-day Darbhanga, Bihar state, India.

Udayana wrote a sub-gloss on Vachaspati's work called the Nyaya-vaartika-taatparya-tiikaa-parishuddhi. He wrote several other works such as the Kusumanjali, Atma-tattva-viveka, Kiranaavali and Nyaya-parishishhta (also called Bodha siddhi or Bodha shuddhi).

He is given credit by Naiyâyikas for having demolished in a final fashion the claims of the Buddhist logicians. All his works, or at least all of which we know, have been preserved, which attest to the respect in which he was held from the beginning.

Two schools of thought for logical proof of the existence of God exist in Hindu philosophy. The old Nyaya system was concerned with the critical examination of the objects of knowledge by means of logical proof, while the earlier Vaiseshika system dealt with particulars—objects that can be thought of and named. Udayana assumed, with the Vaiseshika, that the world was formed by atoms, from which physical bodies also derived. But he was equally concerned with the mind and its right apprehension of objects in nature. His vigorous thinking was set forth in the Nyāya-Kusumānjali and the Bauddhadhikkāra, the latter an attack on the atheistic thesis of Buddhism. Living in a period of lively controversy with the Buddhists, Udayana defended his belief in a personal God by resorting to the two natures of the world: cause and effect. The presence of the world is an effect that cannot be explained by the activity of atoms alone. A supreme being had to cause the effect and regulate the activity of the atoms; hence, according to Udayana, God exists.

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