Dharmottara (ཆོས་མཆོག་)
A major Indian commentator on dharmakirti, belonging to the “philosophical school” of interpretation. An innovator whose readings sometimes depart significantly from Dharmakīrti’s original intent.
Key Contributions
- Offered a strongly pragmatic interpretation of valid-cognition: “it is not apprehending the object that makes a cognition a right cognition but only obtaining a thing” (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 292)
- His famous mirage example (seeking water, finding a mirage, but stumbling upon water anyway) shows why practical success alone is insufficient — a normative/intentional element is also needed (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 292)
- Innovated significantly on the theory of perception, bridging the gap between perception and conception
- Associated with gyel-tsap’s line of Ge-luk interpretation
Seed of the new epistemology
Dreyfus’s most distinctive claim about Dharmottara is that he, not cha-ba, is the originator of the moves that become the “new epistemology” (ཚད་མ་གསར་མ་) in Tibet. Two innovations are decisive:
- Two types of object — held (གཟུང་ཡུལ་) and conceived (ཞེན་ཡུལ་). Both perception and inference have both types of object. The restriction Dharmakīrti places on the object of valid cognition applies only to the held object, while at the level of the conceived (practically applied) object both perception and inference can engage the same continuum — restoring some cognitive coordination between them (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, pp. 359–61). This contradicts Sākya Chok-den’s polemical claim that “conceived object” is a Tibetan creation; Dreyfus shows Dharmottara unambiguously uses it (p. 386).
- A more cognitively active perception — Dharmottara even seems to introduce a “determinate perception” that ascertains its object’s location, time, and aspect (pp. 362–64), prefiguring Cha-ba’s identification of valid perception with elimination of superimposition.
Dreyfus speculates that Subhagupta (650–750) is the Indian source behind Dharmottara’s innovations: Subhagupta distinguished a non-conceptual stage from a conceptual stage that imposes a false aspect on aggregated atoms (p. 363). Dharmottara, also a False Aspectarian, develops this lineage.
The Gettier-like example
Dreyfus highlights Dharmottara’s mirage example (seeking water on a hot day, taking a mirage for water, but reaching the spot and actually finding water under a rock) as functionally identical to Edmund Gettier’s 1963 counterexamples to the JTB analysis of knowledge. Practical success + factual truth are not jointly sufficient for validity — a normative truth condition (the cognition’s correspondence to the proper standards of evaluation) is also required (pp. 292–93).
Sources
- dreyfus-recognizing-reality — Chapters 17, 21, and 22 on perception and the seeds of the new epistemology; Ch. 16 on pragmatism and the Gettier example