"The Indian judiciary draws its jurisprudence from the Anglo-Saxon model which is based on Aristotelian and Persian logic. When I read about Nyay Shastra, I found that it is not a bit inferior to the Aristotelian system. I see no reason that we should forsake, overlook and not benefit from the genius of our ancestors."

"The corrective to this problem in my view is the ancient and powerful Indian practice of 'purva paksha'. This is the traditional dharmic approach to rival schools. It is a dialectical approach, taking a thesis by an opponent ('purva pakshin') and then providing its rebuttal ('khandana') so as to establish the protagonist's views ('siddhanta'). The purva paksha tradition required any debater first to argue from the perspective of his opponent in order to test the validity of his understanding of the opposing position, and from there to realize his own shortcomings. Only after perfecting his understanding of opposing views would he be qualified to refute them. Such debates encourage individuals to maintain flexibility of perspective and honesty rather than seek victory egotistically.In this way, the dialectical process ensures a genuine and far-reaching shift in the individual."

"The corrective to this problem in my view is the ancient and powerful Indian practice of 'purva paksha'. This is the traditional dharmic approach to rival schools. It is a dialectical approach, taking a thesis by an opponent ('purva pakshin') and then providing its rebuttal ('khandana') so as to establish the protagonist's views ('siddhanta'). The purva paksha tradition required any debater first to argue from the perspective of his opponent in order to test the validity of his understanding of the opposing position, and from there to realize his own shortcomings. Only after perfecting his understanding of opposing views would he be qualified to refute them. Such debates encourage individuals to maintain flexibility of perspective and honesty rather than seek victory egotistically. In this way, the dialectical process ensures a genuine and far-reaching shift in the individual. This requires direct but respectful confrontation with one's opponent in debate. In purva paksha one does not look away, so to speak, from real differences but attempts to clarify them, without anxiety but also without the pretence of sameness. There is more to this practice than meets the eye. It involves not only a firm intent but considerable self-mastery (i.e., a movement beyond ego) combined with an understanding of the magnitude of the issues at stake. Reversing the gaze in purva paksha is not painless, and resistance is to be expected. This method was extensively applied among various schools of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism lineages. There are hundreds of volumes of transcripts of these intense debates, and they comprise an important part of the heritage of the dharmic traditions. Advanced training in various schools of Indian philosophy includes a close study of these debates because it was through the purva paksha of the past that each school sharpened itself and evolved over time."

"Also, there can be no finality or closure to dharma. It is more like an open architecture, forever unfolding and assimilating. Purva paksha, on these terms, is not a way of settling debate or of asserting unity but of allowing unity to emerge, dissolve, fall apart and be reborn from moment to moment in the unfolding of civilizational encounters."

"In the Hindu scriptures history is represented as a ceaseless conflict between the Dharma and Adharma — between the moral, idealistic, spiritual forces and the unregenerate forces of darkness, lust, and evil — in which the Dharma always wins. History, ethics, politics, and social speculation are blended together in a cosmic ritual scheme, with gods and culture-heroes acting as conciliatory mediators between the sacred world and the profane world. The battle between good and evil is conceived as a cosmic sacrifice for the common good, ultimately uniting gods and men in the rule of Raja-dharma."

"It is instructive to see with what calmness the Hindu thinkers discuss these questions, seldom resorting to persecution or abuse, and keeping the debate upon a plane reached in our time only by the controversies of the maturest scientists."

"The first of the “Brahmanical” systems in the logical order of Indian thought (for their chronological order is uncertain, and they are in all essentials contemporary) is a body of logical theory extending over two millenniums. Nyaya means an argument, a way of leading the mind to a conclusion."

"Its earliest extant literature, the Sankhya-karika of the commentator Ishvara Krishna, dates back only to the fifth century A.D., and the Sankhya-sutras once attributed to Kapila are not older than our fifteenth century; but the origins of the system apparendy antedate Buddhism itself. The Buddhist texts and the Mahabharata70a repeatedly refer to it, and Winternitz finds its influence in Pythagoras."

"Again, after listing twenty-four Tattwas which belong, in his system, under physical evolution, he upsets all his incipient materialism by introducing, as the last Reality, the strangest and perhaps the most important of them all—Purusha, “Person” or Soul. It is not, like twenty-three other Tattwas, produced by Prakriti or physical force; it is an independent psychical principle, omnipresent and everlasting, incapable of acting by itself, but indispensable to every action. For Prakriti never develops, the Gunas never act, except through the inspiration of Purusha; the physical is animated, vitalized and stimulated to evolve by the psychical principle everywhere.78 Here Kapila speaks like Aristotle..."

"Like another Aristotle, [Gautama] seeks the structure of reasoning in the syllogism, and finds the crux of argument in the middle term;VI like another James or Dewey he looks upon knowledge and thought as pragmatic tools and organs of human need and will, to be tested by their ability to lead to successful action.64 He is a realist, and will have nothing to do with the sublime idea that the world ceases to exist when no one takes the precaution to perceive it. Gautama’s predecessors in Nyaya were apparently atheists; his successors became epistemologists. His achievement was to give India an organon of investigation and thought, and a rich vocabulary of philosophical terms."

"This, says a Hindu historian, “is the most significant system of philosophy that India has produced.” Professor Garbe, who devoted a large part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the thought that “in Kapila’s doctrine, for the first time in the history of the world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited.” It is the oldest of the six systems,69 and perhaps the oldest philosophical system of all. Of Kapila himself nothing is known, except that Hindu tradition, which has a schoolboy’s scorn for dates, credits him with founding the Sankhya philosophy in the sixth century B.C."

"At its outset this seems to be a purely materialistic system: the world of mind and self as well as of body and matter appears entirely as an evolution by natural means, a unity and continuity of elements in perpetual development and decay from the lowest to the highest and back again. There is a premonition of Lamarck in Kapila’s thought... Every state of evolution contains in itself, as Herbert Spencer was to say some time later, a tendency to lapse into dissolution as its fated counterpart and end."

"Kapila, like Laplace, saw no need of calling in a deity to explain creation or evolution... Kapila contents himself with writing (precisely as if he were Immanuel Kant) that a personal creator can never be demonstrated by human reason."