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INTRODUCTION 29or followed the habit of Buddhist writers to treat dialectics in special,separate manuals. From that time we see that every author of somerenoun composes his own manual of dialectics containing instructionsfor carrying on public disputations.During the centuries that followed, the Buddhists made no progressin logic. And this is quite natural How could it have been otherwiseas long as Nagarjuna's ideas held the sway? For the cognition of theAbsolute all logic was condemned. For practical aims in the empiricaldomain the realistic logic of the Naiyayiks was admitted as quitesufficient 1 The necessity of its critique and improvement did not yetdawn upon the Buddhists of that time. But with the advent of a newage, when Nagarjuna's standpoint of extreme relativism was forsaken rthe brothers A sang a and Vasubandhu took up the study ofNyaya logic and the work of its adaptation to the idealistic foundationsof their philosophy.A sang a was probably the first Buddhist writer who introduced thetheory of the five-membered syllogism of the Naiyayiks into the practiceof Buddhist circles. He also established a body of rules on the art ofdebate, not materially different from the rules prescribed in the Nyayaschool. He does not seem to have been very original in the domain oflogic and dialectics, 2Vasubandhu was a renowned teacher of logic, He himself composedthree logical treatises. They have not been translated into Tibetan,but an incomplete Chinese translation of one of them exists. 3 Its title1 The relation between Gotaina and Nagarjuna seems to be of the sortthat obtains between Jaimini and Badarayana, who mutually quote one another,cp. Vidyabhusana, op« cit,, p. 46—47. The term vitanda, in NS. I. 2.1, moreover,we probably must understand as meaning nothing else than the Madhyamikaprasangikamethod of discussion; Srihars'a, KhancjL loc. cit, uses the termvaitandika as a synonym of Madhyamika* It follows that the Naiyayika andMadhy&mika schools are evidently much older than Gotama and Nagarjuna.2 Cp. Vldyabhusana, History, pp. 263—266. The Saptadasa-bhuinisastrais ascribed by him to Mai trey a. Cp. J. Tucci, op. cit.3 On this perplexing problem cp. Sugiura, op. cit. p. 32; Vidyabhuaana,op. cit., p. 267;lyengar JBORS, XII, pp. 587—91, and IHQ., vol. V, pp, 81—86;13 Keith, IHQ., vol. IV, pp. 221 — 227*; J. Tucci, JRAS. f 1928, p. 368 5 1929'p. 451 and IHQ, vol. IV, p. 630. Tucci thinks that the Tarkasastra has nothing to dowith Vadavidhi. But in a paper lead at a meeting of the Buddhist Research Institutionat Leningrad (shortly to appear in the press) M~r Boris Vaasiliev hasestablished that crTarka-sastraw was originally a work on the « science of logic»(jii-shih-lun~tarlca-§astra) in three volumes, in its present condition it representsone volume of collected fragments. M-r Andrew Vostrikov, in another