The Four Situation Cards: Naming the Pramāṇa and Its Owner
The Darshana club of a Bhubaneswar school runs a final-round quiz with four situation cards. Each team must name the pramāṇa at work and say which schools accept it. Card A: a boy who has never seen a gavaya is told that a gavaya is like a cow and, on seeing one in the forest, knows 'this is a gavaya'. Card B: smoke on the hill, fire on the hill. Card C: a villager known to be reliable reports that the bridge has been washed away. Card D: a boy looks at a bare table and knows that the jar is not there. Team 1 answered upamāna, anumāna, śabda, pratyakṣa, and claimed that every āstika school accepts all four. Team 2 gave the same first three answers, called Card D anupalabdhi, and said Nyāya was inconsistent for rejecting it as a separate pramāṇa. Two minutes remain and the judge must give a verdict with reasons.
1. Rule on the four cards: name the pramāṇa for each and identify the defining feature that fixes the name. Then rule on Team 1's claim that all āstika schools accept all four.
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Card A - upamāna. The knowledge arises neither from contact with the object alone nor from inference; it arises from a stated similarity plus subsequent perception, yielding the judgment 'this is that thing called gavaya'. The defining feature is knowledge of a thing through its resemblance to something already known. Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika and Mīmāṃsā count it separately.
Card B - anumāna. The defining feature is the knowledge of the lingin through the linga, resting on a vyāpti (smoke wherever fire). No perception of the fire is involved.
Card C - śabda (āptavacana). The defining feature is knowledge from the utterance of a trustworthy person who is not deceived and does not intend to deceive. It is not inference, because the boy does not reconstruct a universal relation; he takes the report as such.
Card D - pratyakṣa for Nyāya, anupalabdhi for Mīmāṃsā. See the next task.
Team 1's claim is false. Cārvāka accepts pratyakṣa alone and rejects anumāna and śabda outright. Vaiśeṣika in its early sutra stage recognised pratyakṣa and anumāna only, with śabda and upamāna entering later. Sāṃkhya and Yoga work with three. The Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā accepts five, omitting anupalabdhi, while the Bhāṭṭa accepts six. 'All āstika schools accept all four' is therefore not a defensible sentence, and the judge should award the card-by-card answers but strike the claim.
2. Card D is the disputed one. Should anupalabdhi be treated as a separate pramāṇa? Give Nyāya's reasoning and the Mīmāṃsā counter-reasoning, and decide how the judge should score Team 2.
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The case is genuinely contested, so the judge should score the reasoning, not just the label.
Nyāya's position. Absence (abhāva) is a real padārtha and is grasped by pratyakṣa: the eye is in contact with the locus, the bare table, and what is grasped is that locus as qualified by the absence of the jar. On this account a sixth pramāṇa would be redundant, and Nyāya's method prefers economy (lāghava) - do not multiply pramāṇas beyond necessity. Nyāya therefore rejects anupalabdhi as a separate instrument while fully accepting the knowledge it reports.
Mīmāṃsā's counter. Perception requires contact between sense and an existing object. Absence is not an existing object that can be contacted; the bare table is a positive entity, and sight of it does not by itself deliver 'no jar'. Hence a distinct instrument, anupalabdhi - non-apprehension of what would have been apprehended had it been present - is required, and this is why the Bhāṭṭa list runs to six.
Scoring Team 2. The label 'anupalabdhi' is the term of the school that accepts it, so it is not wrong, and the Mīmāṃsā argument is correctly stated. But the charge that Nyāya is 'inconsistent' is unsupported: Nyāya gives a coherent alternative analysis of the same knowledge. Award the card, deduct for the word 'inconsistent' unless the team can show that Nyāya's account of abhāva-pratyakṣa fails. This is exactly the discrimination the round should reward.
3. Team 1 protests that Card C is 'really inference' since the boy reasons from the villager's reliability to the truth of the report. How should the judge rule, and what does the ruling show about the Nyāya list?
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The judge should reject the protest but credit the insight. There is an inferential strand available - one can reason 'this man is reliable, reliable men speak truly, therefore his report is true' - but that is not the knowledge the card describes. The boy who simply believes the report has not constructed a vyāpti; he has accepted a verbal testimony on authority. Nyāya keeps the two apart because śabda has its own defining condition, the utterance of a trustworthy person, and its validity is not borrowed from an inference the hearer happens to be able to reconstruct. Otherwise every case of believing a teacher would count as logic, and the school's separate treatment of āptavacana would collapse.
The episode does show something important about the Nyāya list, however: the four pramāṇas are distinguished by the way knowledge is generated, not by the subject-matter known, so a single episode can be described under more than one head depending on how the knower actually arrived at the belief. That is why the quiz card must fix the knower's state ('he simply takes the report'), and why a team that re-describes the state may be given partial credit if it says so explicitly.
Award Team 1 the marks for Cards A–D and for this re-description; do not award the universal-acceptance claim. The judge's one-line verdict should be: the pramāṇa is fixed by the knower's route, and the route here is testimony.