The Bhikṣuṇī Maṇimēkhalai

23 - Introduction
Pramāṇasamuccaya and Nyāyapravēśa. These are sometimes
criticized in commentaries by Brahmanical commentators as well as
Jain, and, needless to say, quoted with approval and elaborated by
Buddhist commentators. The two works quoted above constitute the
final authoritative texts of this author on the subject, of which the
Nyāyapravēśa seems from the information available to us at present,
the fuller. For our purpose the similarity between this work of
Dignāga and chapter XXIX of the Maṇimēkhalai runs through all
details, and even the examples happen to be the same. This is nothing
surprising as, in the treatment of technical subjects like this, examples
are chosen for their peculiar aptness and all teachers accept them
generally for purposes of illustration. Having regard to the great
reputation that Dignāga has achieved as a logician, it may seem a
natural inference that a poet like the author of the Maṇimēkhalai
should have borrowed the teaching from a treatise like the
Nyāyapravēśa.
Notwithstanding the closeness of similarity, there are a few points in
which the Maṇimēkhalai treatment of the subject seems to mark a
transition from, it may be, the Naiyāyikas to the teaching of Dignāga
himself, particularly so in the two points to which attention had been
drawn, namely, in the statement that the pramāṇas are only two,
others being capable of inclusion in the second, Anumāna; the
reference is obviously made to the other four pramāṇas out of the six
already referred to as current at the time and applicable to the six
systems in book XXVII. We have no right to interpret the other
pramāṇas there as any other than the four of the six, to [xxv] which
the work made explicit reference in book XXVII, whereas Dignāga
seems to have no such qualms, and actually deals with the four