INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method was developed within the South Asian śāstra tradition.
Geography: South Asia — the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain schools and the technical literatures (vyākaraṇa, nyāya, āyurveda, arthaśāstra, yoga) they produced and disputed across.
Time: c. 5th century BCE to the 17th century CE, from Pāṇini to the late Navya-Nyāya. The tradition is bounded at both ends by its own method of transmission: it begins where sūtra literature begins and it is treated as closing where the commentarial lineages break under colonial reorganization, not because thinking stopped.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- A source text or school, and the commentarial lineage that carried it
- A procedure the sources actually specify, distinguishable from the metaphysics it is embedded in
Not sufficient: A doctrine or ontological position — anātman, the guṇas, and the puruṣārthas are not methods. A modern synthesis presented as classical. A darśana's philosophical content where no procedure is extractable.
Boundary: The tradition's inference schemas sit on a seam. The five-membered inference and the hetvābhāsa fallacy catalogue are consequence apparatus and belong in Logical Systems, cross-listed; they are here in the aspect in which they are a procedure a disputant follows. Śāstrārtha as regulated debate belongs in Argumentation and Rhetoric; the preparation and refutation procedure is a method and is here. Catuṣkoṭi and anekāntavāda are placed by the same test: the logic in Logical Systems, the procedure for using it here.