Pramāṇalakṣaṇa

Nyāya, the classical school of Indian logic, refused memory a place among the sources of knowledge, on the ground that memory does not arise directly from its object. This short Sanskrit treatise by Madhva, an independent prose work framed by a verse at each end, gives memory back its standing. It defines the means of valid knowledge, pramāṇa, for Madhva's Dvaita, the dualist school of Vedānta. Validity, on its definition, is simply accord with the object, yathārtha. That covers true knowledge itself, which Madhva ranks in four grades: God's knowledge, without beginning or end; that of Lakṣmī, Vishnu's consort; that of the yogis; and the passing knowledge of everyone else. It also covers the means that produce such knowledge: perception, inference and testimony. Perception comes in seven kinds: the six senses with the mind among them, and the sākṣin, the self's own witnessing awareness. Rival definitions are dismissed one at a time. Validity does not depend on the object being previously unknown, the treatise argues, and a definition limited to fresh experience shuts out memory and leaves no way to know that something was once experienced. The second half catalogues the faults of argument, which it reduces to contradiction and irrelevance, and turns them on one inference in particular: Advaita's proof that the world is false because it is seen. A verse at its close signs the work as Ānandatīrtha's and says it follows the Brahmatarka, a treatise on reasoning that Madhva quotes often and that survives only in his quotations. In the fourteenth century Jayatīrtha, the school's chief systematiser, commented on it in the Nyāyakalpalatā. A sixteenth-century gloss on that commentary by Vijayīndra Tīrtha remained unprinted until the Poornaprajna Samshodhana Mandiram in Bangalore published it with both texts in 2013.