Essay name: Tarkabhasa of Kesava Misra (study)
Author:
Nimisha Sarma
Affiliation: Gauhati University / Department of Sanskrit
This is an English study of the Tarkabhasa of Kesava Misra: a significant work of the syncretic Nyaya-Vaisesika school of Indian philosophy widely used as a beginner's textbook in southern India and has many commentaries. This study includes an extensive overview of the Nyaya and Vaisesika philosophy, epistemology and sources of valid knowledge. It further deals with the contents and commentaries of the Tarkabhasa.
Chapter 4 - Purvabhaga of Tarkabhasa: Contents
69 (of 73)
External source: Shodhganga (Repository of Indian theses)
Download the PDF file of the original publication
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determinate and external relation between two distinct and independent things.
It is one-one relation between ultimately simple elements. Our knowledge in
order to be true must correspond to the external reality as it is. The theory
is criticized on the ground that a purely external relation is meaningless as
well as impossible. If the terms related are conceived as ultimately simple and
independent entities, there can be no relation between them. The entities,
being independent, the relation can not inhere in either or in both, and if the
relation falls outside them both, then the relation itself becomes a third entity
and needs another relation to relate it to the first two and so on ad infinitum.
Again correspondence itself must exist for a mind which actively discovers
truth and does not invent it. Thus the so-called correspondence becomes a
subsequent experience and when we say that our knowledge corresponds with
reality what we contradict. Hence, correspondence glides away in coherence.
The coherence theory is advocated by the idealists who believe that Reality is
a concrete Identity-in-difference, a real Whole which is immanent in all its
diverse parts which are organically related to it. Reality is the ultimate subject
of all our judgments and a judgment is defined as an ideal content referred to
reality. Thought is neither an abstract identity nor a mere difference, but a
living process, a significant Whole which is an identity-in-difference. It is self-
consistent and coherent. Reality is free from contradictions not because it has
annihilated them but because it has overcome their antagonism in its
harmonious bosom. And truth is the systematic coherence which is a
characteristic of a significant whole. This theory is criticized on the ground
that according to it, no truth is completely true, because coherence, being in
