Philosophy

Abstract The Fang Bian Xin Lun is a text on Buddhist logic which is thought to be the earliest one still to be extant. It appears in Chinese only (T1632). The great Italian indologist Giuseppe Tucci, believing that the text was originally a Sanskrit text, translated it into Sanskrit and gave it the title Upa¯yahr: daya. The paper provides the historical background of the development of logic in Classical India up to the time of this text, summarizes its content and translates its first section. The study of reasoning in India has a long history, dating back to at least the time of the Common Era. Unfortunately, the texts dating from that period are rare, many no longer extant; and of the few that are, they are found preserved in translation either into Tibetan or into Chinese. The Chinese texts appear, for the most part, in the Chinese Buddhist Canon, known as the Taisho¯ Daizo¯kyo¯, 1 or Taisho¯ for short. The first text pertaining to Buddhist logic and, presumably, translated from Sa...

The second volume of the Kalātattvakośa, which has (in 1992) come out, refers to zero and the numerical place-value system in its section called "śūnya: mathematical aspect" written by S. R. Sarma. Sarma is of the opinion that "there is enough indirect evidence to say that the decimal place-value system with symbols for 1 to 9 and zero developed in India much before the beginning of the Christian era" (p. 403). This evidence is, according to Sarma, constituted by a passage in the Chandaḥ-Sūtra of Piṅgala, and by another one in the Jaina canonical text Anuyogadvāra. Chandaḥ-Sūtra 8.28-31, Sarma points out, uses the symbols 2 and 0 in a meaningful way. He concludes: "The fact ... that Piṅgala uses them goes to show the existence of a well-recognised symbol for zero at his time, which is variously placed between 400 to 200 B.C." The problem here lies with the date he ascribes to the Chandaḥ-Sūtra. Various authors have pointed out that this date is not all tha...