It is my pleasure to place this Dictionary of Nyaya Terms in the hands of scholars of Indian Philosophy in general and Indian Logic in particular. This volume is a part of an ambitious project of preparing an Encyclopaedia of Indian Logic. Although initially I wanted to make it more exhaustive, however ultimately it could not be made.
It is our experience that there is no uniformity in translating Nyaya terms in English. This has resulted into confusions, many a time. In order to evolve, therefore, uniformity in translating and paraphrasing Nyaya terms into English, I have made this attempt. The reader should look at it from this angle. More stress has been given on clarity of concept than on literal translation. I have tried my best to make the English equivalent readable. One or two occurrences have been pointed out on a particular term by way of reference to the respective original text from where the terms have been taken. After getting comments of the readers, I plan to evolve a form, which will be more useful to the users. This is the first exercise to get feed back from the users so that later on wel-documented edition can be brought out. I take this opportunity to thank the UGC for providing financial assistance for all publications of the CASS. In this work almost every member of the CASS has cooperated. I sincerely thank them all.
Although we have Sanskrit-Sanskrit Dictionary of Nyaya by Jhalakikar, it does not help those scholars who would be seeking for an English equivalent of a Nyaya term. Hence, for a long time I had felt a need to prepare a Sanskrit-English Dictionary of Indian Logic (Natyashastra). Not only that, while translating Nyaya texts various scholars have been using various English equivalents for a Nyaya term. This did not allow uniform understanding of the Nyaya texts. The problem became more complicated with regared to the Navya Nyaya terms. Therefore, initially I had decided to prepare a Sanskrit- English Dictionary of Navya Nyaya logical terms only. But soon I realised that it was not going to serve the desired purpose and 1 revised my decision and decided to include the terms of Pracina Nyaya also to add to its better and fruitful use. The present volume is an outcome of that decision.
Although initially I had thought of adopting encyclopaedic approach of explaining the concept elaborately for each term, that too could not be done considering the scope and the time limit for this work. Under these constraints, a minimum programme was undertaken and I decided to bring out these entries with English paraphrases and some definitions in Sanskrit wherever it was possible. Of course, while doing so, attempt has been made to see that uniform paraphrasing is made on the basis of my long experience of translating Nyaya texts in English. I have not only provided my own paraphrases in English, but I have taken care to see that if these paraphrases are used in the sentences where the vocable occurs in Nyaya texts, the user of the Dictionary will be able to translate that sentence meaningfully.
After an entry in Devanagari, the the Roman transliteration of the entry is provided in the brackets which will help those who are not so habituated to read Devanagari. After the English paraphrase and Sanskrit definitions, wherever possible, actual reference is provided so that the user of the Dictionary can read the entry in its actual context. It is however presumed that the user is broadly familiar with Sanskrit Language and the Nyaya logic. Although the Dictionary can be used by general readers, still at times the English paraphrase may not help them grasp the central concept of Indian Logic.
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