Fazun’s Abridged Exposition of the Pramāṇasamuccaya

A condensed English rendering, chapter by chapter, of Fazun’s Chinese exposition of dignaga’s pramanasamuccaya and its auto-commentary — the Jiliang lun lüejie (集量論略解), published in the CBETA supplement to the canon (大藏經補編 vol. 9, no. 40).

Why this commentary

The Sanskrit of the Pramāṇasamuccaya has not been recovered. Yijing translated it into Chinese in 711 and that translation was lost soon afterwards, so the text survives complete only in the two Tibetan translations preserved in the Tengyur. Fazun’s exposition is the modern Chinese route back into it: a translation of root verses and auto-commentary together with a running gloss, made from the Tibetan.

He worked from the Derge translation and collated it against the Peking one, annotating throughout by reference to the Nyāyamukha, Dignāga’s other surviving logical work. Where the two Tibetan versions diverge he often says so and admits he cannot always tell which is right. The prefatory material of the Chinese edition disagrees with Fazun’s own closing note about which Indian paṇḍita worked with which Tibetan translator, and the pairing given in the closing note — Vasudhararakṣita for the Derge version, Kanakavarman with Xinhui for the Peking — is the one that matches the Chinese preface [unverified].

Fazun was near eighty when he finished, his eyesight and health both failing, and it was the last thing he wrote. He says in his own preface that he had no oral transmission on the treatise and very few commentaries to hand, and offers the work as a draft. That judgement is worth carrying into the reading: the exposition is a serious scholar’s provisional reconstruction, not a settled edition.

What these pages are

Each page condenses one chapter. Root verses are given as Fazun gives them, and the prose beneath summarises his exposition rather than translating it in full. The argumentative structure — the divisions, the objections and their replies, the named opponents — is preserved; the elaborations and cross-references of the Chinese are not. Chinese technical terms are kept in brackets where the English rendering is contestable. Uncertain readings carry an [unverified] marker.

For the treatise itself, its structure and its reception, see pramanasamuccaya.

Collation with the Tibetan annotation commentary

Fazun closes chapter 4 asking that the text be collated against a Tibetan master’s commentary should one be obtained. That collation has since been made against Khenchen Kunga Wangchuk’s annotation commentary ཚད་མ་ཀུན་བཏུས་ཀྱི་མཆན་འགྲེལ་ཚིག་དོན་གསལ་བྱེད་, a running annotation on the Pramāṇasamuccaya together with the Nyāyabindu and the Pramāṇaviniścaya, held under raw/commentaries-tb/pramanasamuccaya/.

Where it settles a reading, the chapter page says so at that point. Three places so far:

• Chapter 1, the first account of the result of valid cognition: the Tibetan supports the “not without difference” variant, and divides the section as Fazun does.
• Chapter 3, the reasons unfit as refutations: the Tibetan reading stands and the Chinese 不許皆能破 is the divergent witness.
• Chapter 4, four points Fazun leaves open — the direct-and-implied division of the two modes between the two examples, the force of the two negations, which two of the nine reasons still err with both examples stated, and the full count of the pseudo-examples.

Chapters

Related

• pramanasamuccaya — the treatise
• dignaga — its author
• index — the companion series on Sakya Paṇḍita’s pramanayuktanidhi
• katsura-dignaga-lectures — a modern account of the treatise’s structure, useful alongside Fazun’s