Philosopher
Jayarāśi
fl. 800–840 CE
Also known as Jayarashi, Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa, Jayarashi Bhatta
Sceptic of the materialist Cārvāka tradition whose "Lion of the Dissolution of All Categories" argued that no school had ever validly defined the sources of knowledge it relied on.
Almost nothing is known of Jayarāśi’s life. He most likely flourished between 800 and 840, probably in South India, and his title, Bhaṭṭa, may suggest that he was a Brahmin. His only surviving work, a treatise whose title can be read as “The Lion of the Dissolution of All Categories”, was known in medieval India but largely ignored, and it was lost to modern scholarship until a palm-leaf manuscript was found in a library at Patan in 1926 and published in 1940.
Before then he was taken for a typical materialist of the Cārvāka or Lokāyata school, but the treatise showed something quite different, and scholars have since called him a sceptic, an agnostic, a nihilist or a materialist. He placed himself in the materialist tradition, quoting its revered teacher Bṛhaspati, while criticising almost every other school: Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Mīmāṃsā, Buddhist and Jaina. Few took up his arguments, chiefly two Jaina philosophers and one of the Nyāya school, but his method of refutation was adopted by later Jaina thinkers.
Key ideas
- The dissolution of all categories
- To establish the sources of knowledge we need proper definitions of them, and to test those definitions we would already need to know what is real, which in turn requires reliable sources of knowledge. Caught in this circle, we can neither define valid knowledge nor say what reality is.
- Refutation without a counter-thesis
- Jayarāśi lists every conclusion an opponent’s thesis allows and shows that each fails, so the thesis falls. Like a Pyrrhonist, he then asserts nothing in its place; disproving that universals exist, he does not say what does exist instead.
- No definition survives
- No school had given an irrefutable definition of perception, so we cannot tell a genuine perception from a mirage or a dream. Inference rests on perception, universals and induction, and testimony needs other sources and a way to recognise authority; on the definitions available, nothing is certain.
- Logic, not empirical inference
- Jayarāśi never questions the laws of logic, such as non-contradiction and excluded middle, which he applies strictly. What he rejects is anumāna, inference from observed regularities as the Indian schools defined it.
- Follow the worldly path
- His treatise opens with a verse saying that the worldly path should be followed, since in everyday practice the fool and the wise are alike. He was a methodological sceptic who kept positive beliefs, not one who doubted everything the senses bring.
- Tradition
- Indian
- Region
- probably South India
- Themes
- Knowledge and scepticism
Influences
Where these links come from
- Jayarāśi drew on Nāgārjuna. Source: Piotr Balcerowicz, Jayarāśi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- The Lion of the Dissolution of All Categories (Tattvopaplavasiṃha)
Terms on this page
- anumāna
- Inference, one of the ways of knowing (pramāṇas) that Indian philosophers debated. Materialists were known for accepting perception alone and rejecting inference.
Sources
- Piotr Balcerowicz, Jayarāśi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy