As is well known, with the exception of Jayarasi’s Tattvopalavasim: ha, none of the

original works of the Lokayata has survived. The little we know about this school

of thought comes mainly from doxographical works such as the Sarva-darsanasam: graha and from short quotations from Lokayata works by their Brah-

manic, Buddhist and Jaina adversaries. Some of these fragments are attributed to

authors such as Br:haspati, Bhavivivkta, Kambalasvatara, Aviddhakarn:a, Vyad: i,Purandara and Udbhat:t:a,1 while others are anonymous. Among the anonymous

fragments perhaps the best known is the so-called sadvitıyaprayoga, which was

criticized by Dharmakırti in the Praman:avarttika IV 34–35 and Praman:aviniscayaIII 14.5–17.2, and can be safely allocated to the time between Dignaga and Dharma-

kırti. It reads like nonsense:

abhivyaktacaitanyasarıralaks:an:apurus:aghat:anyatarasadvitıyo ghatah: , anutpala-tvat, kud: yavat.

1 Cf. Franco (2011).

Eli Franco (&)Institute of Indology and Central Asian Studies,Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germanye-mail: franco@uni-leipzig.de

123

J Indian Philos (2012) 40:219–224

DOI 10.1007/s10781-012-9152-5

A Note on the Sadvitıyaprayoga

Eli Franco

Published online: 3 February 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

‘‘The pot is accompanied2 either by a man who is characterized as a body where

consciousness is manifested, or by a pot, because it is not a lotus, just like a wall.’’

This intriguing fragment has already been studied several times by some of the

best scholars in the field. In a recent paper Takashi Iwata conveniently summarizes

previous research on this inference (Iwata 2007, p. 325): ‘‘Light has been shed on

that inference in papers by Watanabe (1977, 197ff.); Steinkellner (1981, 293f.)

made available a Sanskrit fragment of Sakyabuddhi that was found in Vibhuti-

candra’s appendix to Praman:avarttikavr: tti; T. J. F. Tillemans has examined

Dharmakırti’s refutation of the sadvitıyaprayoga in PV IV; Tani (1984) and

Watanabe (1992) give translations of the relevant passage in PVin III. Tillemans’

study based on PV IV has elucidated the core of this issue.’’ And Iwata himself has

contributed a major study of the inference on the basis of the newly available

Sanskrit manuscripts of Dharmakırti’s Praman:aviniscaya and Dharmottara’s

Praman:aviniscayat:ıka.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the inference has not been properly understood,

perhaps because it was looked at from a Dharmakırtian, or even Post-Dharma-

kırtian, point of view. Thus, in his foundational study Tillemans (1991, p. 407)

describes the Carvaka’s reasoning as follows:

‘‘(a) the first point is obvious. A vase is not an utpala flower. Hence the paks:a-dharmatva holds.

(b) the Carvaka then uses various tricks and pseudo-parallels with Buddhist logic to

establish the general principle or pervasion (vyapti).(c) finally, he maintains that a vase cannot be accompanied by itself—sadvitıyatva

necessitates difference—and therefore it must be accompanied by the person.

(d) if the vase is accompanied by a person whose mind is just a manifestation of the

elements, then the materialist view on what people are is correct, with the result

that all rebirth is impossible, for such ‘‘people’’ would be destroyed at the time

of their death.’’

Yet how the Carvaka expected to establish a vyapti remains unclear.

Similarly in his translation of PV IV Tillemans (2000, p. 59) states: ‘‘The Car-

vaka then uses various tricks and pseudo-parallels with Buddhist logic, first to

establish the general principle, or ‘pervasion’ (vyapti), and later to show that for

Carvaka and Buddhist alike the demand for such a pervasion in inferences can in

fact never be satisfied.’’

2 Lit. ‘‘together with a second’’; ‘‘seconded’’ could be a nice literal translation, but has a special meaning

in English of ‘‘helping, supporting,’’ which is absent in sadvitıya. I will therefore use the common

translation ‘‘accompanied’’ (even though sa- alone already expresses ‘‘accompanied’’). The use of the term

sadvitıya seems to be quite rare, and there are much more common ways of saying ‘‘accompanied’’ in

Sanskrit; the reason for using this expression is that it implies that something or someone is accompanied

by a second, different thing or person. One could indeed say that one pot is accompanied by another pot,

but that is precisely what the author intends to exclude by using the term sadvitıya, and this exclusion is

not contested by Dharmakırti and his commentators. Another way of putting this is to say that the term

‘pot’ is used here collectively for all pots. Cf. Sakyabuddhi’s explanation in Steinkellner (1981, p. 293):

. . . sadhyadharmino ’ses:aghat:apaks: ıkaran: e . . . Furthermore, the term pot, atleast in the characterization

of the sapaks:a and vipaks:a, seems to refer not only to all pots, past, present and future, but also to all

potential pots or to all places where a pot could exist.

220 Eli Franco

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Although Iwata’s contribution substantially advances our understanding of the

discussion by Dharmakırti and Dharmottara, he pays little attention to the original

intention of the Carvaka perhaps because he considers that Tillemans has already

elucidated the core of this issue or perhaps because he considers the inference to be

fundamentally wrong.3 Iwata explains the inference following Dharmottara (2007,

p. 323): ‘‘From the standpoint of the Carvakas, the pervasion, according to Dhar-

mottara’s commentary, can be explained in the following way: the co-presence of

the reason and the property to be proved is established, because it is illustrated by a

wall which is not a blue lotus and is accompanied by either of the two, namely, a

pot. The co-absence of the reason and the property to be proved is also established,

because it is illustrated by the ether on the basis of the idea that real properties

belong only to entities, not to what does not exist at all.’’

In my opinion, the unfounded assumption in the above mentioned studies is that

the Carvaka attempts to establish a vyapti. I see no compelling reason for this

assumption. In fact, there is no concomitance between the reason and the property to

be proved. This is clear in the formulation of the vyatireka: Wherever there is no

sadvitıyatva with a pot or a person (e.g., in akasa4), there is no anutpalatva. But that

is not true because akasa is not a lotus. If one objects, however, that the relationship

between akasa, assumed here to be an unreal entity, and the absence of the property

‘‘not being a lotus’’ is open to various interpretations and is problematic, one can

observe that the vyapti is doubtful in the anvaya too, precisely because the pot is not

accompanied by a pot and it is doubtful whether it is accompanied by a person as

defined above.

Instead of attributing to the Carvaka unconvincing attempts to establish a con-

comitance where there is none, I would rather argue that it is anachronistic to

consider the establishment of trairupya at the time prior to Dharmakırti as equiv-

alent to establishment of vyapti and paks:adharmata. And when we stop looking at

the Carvaka inference through vyapti-glasses, it becomes immediately clear.

The Carvaka’s ingenious stratagem in this sophism was to relate the first member

of the disjunction (the person) to the subject of the inference (paks:a), and the second

(the pot) to the similar example (sapaks:a). To understand this move, one has to

remember, as rightly pointed out by Tillemas and others, that the term sadvitıyaimplies that the accompanied thing cannot be accompanied by itself.

The terms of this inference which determine the validity of the reason are clear:

Subject (paks:a): pot.

Similar example (sapaks:a): a wall, that is, whatever is accompanied by a man

who is characterized as a body where consciousness is manifested, or by a pot.

(While the Buddhist opponent may dispute the first member of the disjunction, he

cannot deny the second, namely, that a wall can be accompanied by a pot.)

3 Cf. Iwata (2007, p. 324): ‘‘Yet such a thesis is in reality not faultless. Its faults can be easily pointed out

through a quick survey.’’ (2007, p. 325): ‘‘It is true that as long as one’s aim is the general one of refuting

the Carvakas’ thesis, one may assume that their thesis can be easily refuted. But the logical invalidation of

their argument is not as easy as one expects.’’ My purpose here is not to show why the inference is wrong,

but why it is right in its historical context.4 The example is taken from Dharmottara’s T: ıka as quoted by Iwata (2007, p. 323, n. 25); cf. below.

A Note on the Sadvitıyaprayoga 221

123

Dissimilar example (vipaks:a): Whatever is accompanied by neither a man who is

characterized as a body where consciousness is manifested, nor by a pot; no con-

crete example is given. Thus,

(a) The first condition of a valid reason, namely being a property of the subject of

inference, obviously holds because the property of not being a lotus is present in

a pot (since the pot is not a lotus).

(b) The second condition, namely to be present in the similar example, holds too

because the property of not being a lotus is present in a wall (since the wall is

not a lotus).

(c) The third condition, namely absence in dissimilar examples, is the most prob-

lematic, for we do not know what example the Carvaka had in mind. He may

have used a non-existing thing such as akasa,5 as explained by Dharmottara, and

argued that non-existing things do not have existing properties such as ‘not

being a lotus’.6

Thus, the three conditions of a valid reason are fulfilled and the disjunctive property

‘‘being accompanied either by a man who is characterized as a body where con-

sciousness is manifested, or by a pot’’ is correctly attributed to a pot. However, as

mentioned above, a pot is not accompanied by itself. Therefore the second member

of the disjunction has to be excluded in the case of a pot. Consequently, the pot is

accompanied by a man who is characterized as a body where consciousness is

manifested. In other words, while a wall, if the opponent so wills, may not be

accompanied by ‘‘a man who is characterized as a body where consciousness is

manifested,’’ but can be accompanied by a pot, the pot itself cannot be accompanied

by a pot and thus has to be accompanied by ‘‘a person defined as body where

consciousness is manifested.’’

Once we understand the Carvaka inference, we can also better understand

Dharmakırti’s response to it. It is improbable, I think, that the word samanya in both

the Praman:avarttika and Praman:aviniscaya passages refers to a universal. It also

does not make sense to attribute to the Carvaka the position that ‘‘the sadhya-dharma, or ‘property to be proved’, is simply sadvitıyatva, ‘being accompanied’,

rather than ‘being accompanied by a vase or a person, etc. etc.’’’ (Tillemans 1991,

p. 407, see also Tillemans 2000, p. 59 and Iwata 2007, p. 324, 328ff.). Tillemans

considers this to be one of the ‘‘tricks’’ that the Carvaka uses in order to establish the

vyapti in the above inference.7 However, when Dharmakırti says samanyena (‘‘in

general’’) as in sadhyam: samanyena sam: matam (PV 4.34), samanyena sadhyamis: t:am iti na vises: apeks:ah: (PVin III 14.9) or similar expressions, he probably simply

5 The example would thus be tailored for a Buddhist opponent who does not admit the existence of

akasa; if the opponent were a Sarvastivada or a Naiyayika another example of a non-existing thing

(avastu) would have to be used.6 Presumably the Carvaka position could be that non-existing things can have only non-existing prop-

erties. This could have been contested, but it isn’t, at least not by Dharmakırti and his commentators. If

the opponent would claim that even non-existing things have their reality and possess properties such as

sadvitıyatva, the Carvaka could still save his inference by claiming to use kevalanvayi-hetu.7 This is not to deny that some of Dharmakırti’s commentators understood him in this manner, though as

far as I can see Dharmottara is not among them.

222 Eli Franco

123

means that the disjunction should be taken as inclusive ‘‘or’’ i.e., is considered true

if the one, the other or both its members are true, disregarding whether it is the one

or the other ‘‘particular’’ (i.e., the person or the pot). Further, when Dharmakırti

speaks of contradiction (viruddhata, PV 4.34, etc.), he does not seem to refer to a

contradictory reason (cf. Tillemas 2000, p. 60), for anutpalatva does not prove the

opposite of the sadvitıyatva, but to a contradictory thesis (pratijña, vacana): If the

second member of the disjunction (the pot) is to be attributed to the subject of

the inference, then the resulting thesis ‘‘the pot is accompanied by a pot’’ contradicts

itself because nothing is accompanied by itself.

The purpose of the Carvaka in this inference was probably not primarily to

establish that a person is nothing but a body in which consciousness is manifested,

for this inference can easily be countered with the opposite inference (cf. virud-dhavyabhicari-hetu), but to show a serious deficiency in the structure of inference

that allows any odd thesis to be established, and consequently that inference should

not be considered a reliable means of knowledge, especially not for establishing

metaphysical entities such as God and Soul.

The bankruptcy of the trairupya doctrine is also apparent in another inference

referred to by Dharmakırti, which seems to have been inspired by the sadvitıya-prayoga, and which may have been put forward by a Mımam: saka:

Sound is permanent because it is either the paks:a or the sapaks:a.8

This inference differs from the sadvitıyaprayoga inasmuch as the disjunction

appears in the reason, not in the property to be proved. Yet here too it is obvious

how the three conditions of a valid reason are fulfilled, and that there is no attempt

to establish a vyapti:9

(a) The first condition obtains because being either paks:a or sapaks:a is present in

sound (for sound is the paks:a).

(b) The second condition obtains because being either paks:a or sapaks:a is present in

the sapaks:a (¼some permanent thing).

(c) The third condition obtains because both being paks:a and sapaks:a are absent

(by definition) in the vipaks:a (all impermanent things).

Here too it is obvious that the inference could be countered by its opposite and that

the same reason could prove that sound is impermanent. It seems probable, there-

fore, that a Mımam: saka used this inference to show that the doctrine of trairupya,

and inferences in general, are unreliable, thereby strengthening the authority of the

Veda, which could not be assailed by such an unreliable and arbitrary so-called

means of knowledge. One can well imagine a Mımam: saka and a Carvaka joining

forces in such an endeavour, each for his own purpose.

8 Cf. PVin III 18.3: etena paks:asapaks: anyataratvam api pratyuktam.9 There is obviously no vyapti between being paks:a or sapaks:a in general (in any given inference) and

permanence (nor, of course, between impermanence and not being paks:a or sapaks:a). A concomitance

could hold only with one individual property (or at most two if one considers the disjunction to comprise

two properties), namely, being paks:a or sapaks:a in this inference and permanence. Technically one may

consider the reason as savises:a-hetu.

A Note on the Sadvitıyaprayoga 223

123

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