Gautama, Akṣapāda

‘Akṣapāda Gautama’ (or ‘Gotama’) stands for the legendary founder of the Nyāya (‘Logic’) school of Indian philosophy, who is reputed also to be the author of its basic text, the Nyāyasūtra. This compilation of roughly 500 mnemonic sentences reached its first defined form around ad 400. Its oldest core preserves a manual of philosophical debate supplemented by elements of an early philosophy of nature and a basic soteriology. The later parts of the text deal with the number and nature of the means of valid cognition; they further treat the objects of valid cognition and discuss basic questions of metaphysical content.