Previous Year Question

Pair 1 is incorrect. Āryadeva was not a Jaina scholar; he was a Buddhist philosopher. Flourishing around the third century CE, he was an important Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher and is traditionally regarded as a direct disciple of Nagarjuna. His major work is the Catuḥśataka or Four Hundred Verses. Oxford Academic identifies him as a central figure in the development of early Indian Madhyamaka philosophy.

An important trap is that Āryadeva criticised Jain and other philosophical doctrines in his writings, but this does not make him a Jaina scholar. He himself belonged to the Buddhist Madhyamaka tradition.

Pair 2 is correct. Dignāga was a major Buddhist philosopher, logician and epistemologist. Flourishing around the fifth–sixth centuries CE, he played a foundational role in the development of Indian Buddhist logic and epistemology.

Among Dignāga's most important works was the Pramāṇasamuccaya. His philosophical system gave particular importance to perception and inference as valid means of knowledge, and his work laid important foundations for the later Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti.

Thus, Dignāga — Buddhist Scholar is correctly matched.

Pair 3 is also correct. Nāthamuni was an important Vaishnava, specifically Sri Vaishnava, teacher and scholar. Tradition credits him with collecting and organising the Tamil devotional hymns of the Alvars, forming the corpus known as the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, or the Four Thousand Sacred Hymns. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions also identifies Nāthamuni as the collector of this important Vaishnava anthology.

The three pairs can therefore be remembered as:

Āryadeva → Buddhist Madhyamaka philosopher — Pair 1 incorrect
Dignāga → Buddhist logician/philosopher — Pair 2 correct
Nāthamuni → Vaishnava/Sri Vaishnava scholar — Pair 3 correct