  The study of causation is an important part of Indian philosophical thought. One reason for this is the early interest in cosmological speculation: “We should remember that philosophic activity in India arose out of the cosmogonic speculations of the Vedas and the Upaniṣads. The all-important business of philosophy was to attempt to discover some simple, unitary cause for the origin of this complex universe” (Matilal 1985: 287). Another reason is that Indian linguistics (especially the Pāṇinian system of ‘kārakas’ or relations between verb and noun, which greatly influenced Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā and Buddhist thinkers) is based on an underlying causal model, in which the verb in a sentence designates an event, for the production of which each such object as is designated by a noun has a particular causal role. This same model informed and influenced Indian epistemology, and led to the development of the theory of ‘pramāṇas’, the causal means or processes leading to an epistemically accredited awareness-event (pramā). In the Nyāya tradition, four such pramāṇas are recognised: perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna), ‘analogical identification’ or ‘comparison’ (upamāna) and testimony (śabda). The accounts given of each of these employ an extremely causalistic idiom, typical questions being ‘what causes a perceptual experience?’, ‘what are the distinguishing causal factors of true and false perceptual experiences?’, ‘under what conditions does knowledge of the premises of an argument cause knowledge of the conclusion?’, etc.