Nyāya presents a path in which liberation is grounded in clear, disciplined knowing. At its heart stands the analysis of valid knowledge (*pramā*), gained through four means (*pramāṇas*): perception, inference, comparison, and verbal testimony. Perception is treated as direct, non-erroneous cognition arising from contact between the senses and their objects, while inference is carefully structured reasoning from a sign to what it signifies. Comparison allows the unknown to be grasped through likeness with the known, and testimony rests on the words of trustworthy authorities and sacred sources. Error, in this vision, is not mysterious but traceable to defects in these means, and the spiritual task is to purify and refine them.

Alongside this epistemic focus, Nyāya lays out what is to be known: the self, body, senses, objects, cognition, mind, activity, defects such as attachment and aversion, rebirth, results like pleasure and pain, and the cessation of suffering. These are gathered within a broader scheme of categories (*padārthas*), including both the means of knowledge and the objects of knowledge, as well as the structures of inquiry itself—doubt, purpose, example, established doctrine, and the elements of reasoning. The tradition is realist and pluralist, affirming an external world, multiple enduring selves, and a systematic classification of reality that can be investigated and understood. Later developments also articulate a theistic dimension, defending a creator God known through inference and testimony, without abandoning the primacy of rational examination.

Nyāya’s logical discipline is perhaps its most distinctive spiritual instrument. It formulates a five-member syllogism—proposition, reason, example, application, and conclusion—to make explicit how a conclusion is rightly grounded. This is paired with a detailed mapping of fallacies (*hetvābhāsa*) and improper forms of debate, so that seekers learn not only how to reason but how to recognize where reasoning goes astray. Discussion, debate, and even wrangling are all analyzed as modes of inquiry, with specific points at which an argument is judged to have failed. In this way, the art of argument becomes a form of inner purification, training the mind to distinguish the sound from the unsound.

From the standpoint of spiritual aspiration, all of this serves a single aim: the removal of suffering through the removal of ignorance. The self is understood as a permanent subject of cognitions and actions, bound by defects and karmic consequences as long as its knowledge is distorted. When valid knowledge, grounded in the four *pramāṇas* and tested by rigorous logic, dispels false views, the roots of attachment, aversion, and delusion are cut. What remains is the cessation of suffering and the end of the cycle of rebirth, a liberation that is not reached by blind faith but by a painstaking, reasoned seeing of things as they are.