Nyāya presents a nuanced vision of truth and liberation. It is a realist and pluralist system that maintains that reality consists of many distinct entities—self, God, objects, qualities, relations—and that these can be known as they truly are. Its central claim is that valid knowledge (pramā), gained through carefully analyzed means of knowing, can disclose ultimate realities such as ātman, Īśvara, karma, and mokṣa. In this sense, it does not confine itself to merely practical or relative truths, but aspires to knowledge that is objectively true and metaphysically significant.

The path it lays out is rigorously epistemological. Nyāya holds that perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna), comparison (upamāna), and verbal testimony (śabda), when properly employed, can yield certain knowledge of what truly exists. This includes not only everyday objects but also subtle entities and the conditions for liberation. Scriptural testimony, in particular, is regarded as indispensable for matters that lie beyond direct perception, such as the precise workings of karma or the nature of dharma. Liberation is understood as the cessation of suffering that follows from the removal of ignorance and error through such right knowledge.

Yet Nyāya is equally clear about the finitude and fallibility of ordinary cognition. Sense perception can be distorted, inference can go astray if its premises are faulty, and testimony can mislead if its source is unreliable. Hence the tradition devotes great effort to diagnosing doubt, error, and logical fallacies, and to refining the instruments of knowledge rather than promising effortless omniscience. The ideal it holds out is not an ineffable, nondual absorption beyond all concepts, but veridical, conceptually articulated understanding of a real, plural world and of the self’s possibility of freedom.

From this standpoint, what might be called “absolute truth” is not a mystical fusion with an undifferentiated Absolute, but accurate cognition of things as they are, especially of the self and its ultimate release from suffering. Nyāya maintains that such truth is, in principle, attainable through disciplined reasoning and trustworthy testimony, though it does not suggest that every individual in practice attains exhaustive knowledge of all that exists. Its promise is more modest and, at the same time, profound: by steadily purifying and correcting cognition, one can arrive at genuine knowledge of ultimate matters, and that knowledge itself serves as the gateway to liberation.