Nyaya-sudha and the Commentaries on Madhva

Jayatirtha's claim to the title Tikacharya, "the Commentator," rests on a body of writing that Wikipedia's own sourced list of his works puts at twenty-one titles: eighteen commentaries on works by Madhvacharya and three independent treatises of his own. Almost nothing in Madhva's own Sarvamula corpus was left untouched. Sharma's academic history treats this completeness — commenting on nearly the whole body of his guru's teacher's writing in a working life of only twenty-three years — as the single fact that did more than anything else to win Dvaita Vedanta a standing equal to the far older Advaita and Vishishtadvaita schools.

The Nyaya-sudha, His Magnum Opus #

Jayatirtha's most important work is the Nyaya-sudha, a vast commentary on Madhvacharya's Anu-vyakhyana, itself Madhva's own verse supplement to his Brahma-sutra-bhashya. Sharma's history records that it runs to roughly 24,000 granthas (verse-units) and was originally titled Visamapada-vakyartha-vivrti before later tradition settled on the shorter name by which it is known today, popularly abbreviated simply as the Sudha. It engages closely and technically with the rival Vedanta commentators of its day — Shankaracharya, Bhaskara, Ramanujacharya and Yadavaprakasha among them — as well as with the separate schools of Nyaya, Samkhya, Mimamsa and Buddhist philosophy. A traditional saying quoted by Sharma holds that the Sudha alone deserves to be called a true commentary, and Sharma's own scholarly verdict, after a lifetime studying this literature, calls it a work with "not one other" like it "in the whole range of Sanskrit philosophical literature."

The Tattva-prakashika and the Rest of the Sutra-prasthana #

Second in importance, and by far the most widely studied commentary on Madhva's Brahma-sutra-bhashya today, is the Tattva-prakashika, running to about 8,000 granthas. It so thoroughly superseded the commentaries written before it that Sharma records at least eleven later Dvaita scholars writing their own commentaries on it in turn — chief among them Sri Vyasa Tirtha's own Tatparya-chandrika, still studied today.

Beyond these two central works, Jayatirtha left commentaries on nearly every other text in Madhva's Sutra-prasthana and beyond: on the Tattva-samkhyana, Tattva-viveka, Tattvoddyota, Vishnu-tattva-nirnaya, Mayavada-khandana, Prapancha-mithyatvanumana-khandana, Upadhi-khandana, Pramana-lakshana and Karma-nirnaya (all short polemical tracts of Madhva's own), the Nyaya-vivarana, the Shatprashna Upanishad-bhashya and Isha Upanishad-bhashya, the Rg-bhashya, and two separate commentaries on Madhva's writing on the Bhagavad-gita — the Gita-bhashya Prameya-dipika and the Gita-tatparya Nyayadipika. Taken together with the Nyaya-sudha and Tattva-prakashika, this brings his commentarial output to eighteen works.

Three Works Of His Own #

Jayatirtha also left three independent works, not commentaries on Madhva at all. The Vadavali is an early, sharply argued tract refuting the Advaita doctrine that the visible world is ultimately unreal, or mithya. The Pramana-paddhati is a compact textbook of Dvaita epistemology, laying out the pramanas (means of valid knowledge) recognized by the school and its theory of how error and mistaken cognition arise. The Padyamala is a smaller treatise on points of worship drawn from Madhva's own Tantra-sara-sangraha. Between the commentaries and these three original works, later tradition ranked Jayatirtha, together with Madhvacharya and Vyasa Tirtha, as one of the Munitraya, "the three sages" of Dvaita Vedanta — the same three names to whom Sharma's own history is formally dedicated.