fy and even suppress such of the traditionary
views with which they did not agree or which they found it difficult
to maintain. Brilliant oppositions from the opposing schools
often made it necessary for them to offer solutions to new problems
unthought of before, but put forward by some illustrious adherent
of a rival school. In order to reconcile these new solutions with
the other parts of the system, the commentators never hesitated to
offer such slight modifications of the doctrines as could harmonize
them into a complete whole. These elaborations or modifications
generally developed the traditionary system, but did not effect any
serious change in the system as expounded by the older teachers,
for the new exponents always bound themselves to the explanations
of the older teachers and never contradicted them. They
would only interpret them to suit their own ideas, or say new things
only in those cases where the older teachers had remained silent.
It is not therefore possible to describe the growth of any system
by treating the contributions of the individual commentators separately.
This would only mean unnecessary repetition. Except
when there is a specially new development, the system is to be
interpreted on the basis of the joint work of the commentators
treating their contributions as forming one whole.

The fact that each system had to contend with other rival
systems in order to hold its own has left its permanent mark
upon all the philosophic literatures of India which are always
written in the form of disputes, where the writer is supposed to
be always faced with objections from rival schools to whatever
he has got to say. At each step he supposes certain objections
put forth against him which he answers, and points out the defects
of the objector or shows that the objection itself is ill founded. It
is thus through interminable byways of objections, counter-objections
and their answers that the writer can wend his way to his
destination. Most often the objections of the rival schools are
referred to in so brief a manner that those only who know the
views can catch them. To add to these difficulties the Sanskrit
style of most of the commentaries is so condensed and different
from literary Sanskrit, and aims so much at precision and brevity,
leading to the use of technical words current in the diverse systems,
that a study of these becomes often impossible without the aid
of an expert preceptor; it is diffi