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Dharmottara

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Dharmottara (ཆོས་མཆོག་)

One of the three Indian commentarial traditions Stcherbatsky distinguished, the “philosophical school”, is Dharmottara’s (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 21). Dreyfus’s interest in him is not as an expositor but as the point where Dharmakīrti’s system starts being rebuilt from inside.

Key Contributions

  • A strongly pragmatic reading 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 mirage example, which cuts against the pragmatic reading as much as for it (below)
  • Two innovations in the theory of perception that let perception and conception cooperate, which Dharmakīrti’s system had made impossible

Nothing on this page comes from Dharmottara. No work of his is held in raw/ — neither the Nyāyabinduṭīkā nor the Pramāṇaviniścayaṭīkā — so every claim below is Dreyfus’s reconstruction, and the Tibetan sources that do mention Dharmottara here (the Treasury commentaries, Gorampa on PV 1) do so as opponents rather than expositors. [unverified]

Seed of the new epistemology

The stake here is a charge, not a chronology. Sakya polemic treats cha-ba’s “new epistemology” (ཚད་མ་གསར་མ་) as a Tibetan deformation of an Indian original, and sakya-chok-den argues that its central concepts have no Indian source. Dreyfus’s answer is that Dharmottara had already made the decisive moves, so what Cha-ba did was radicalise an Indian revisionist current rather than invent a Tibetan one. Two innovations carry the argument:

  1. Two types of object, held (གཟུང་ཡུལ་) and conceived (ཞེན་ཡུལ་), possessed by perception and inference alike. Dharmakīrti’s restriction on the object of valid cognition then applies only to the held object, and at the level of the conceived object, the one practical activity engages, perception and inference can bear on the same continuum. That restores the cognitive coordination the strict dichotomy had ruled out (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, pp. 360–361). It also settles the polemical question directly: Dharmottara unambiguously asserts a conceived object, so the concept is not a Tibetan creation, whatever else may be said against it (p. 386).
  2. A more cognitively active perception. Dharmottara seems to admit a determinate perception that ascertains its object’s location, time and aspect (pp. 362–364), which is what Cha-ba later hardens into the identification of valid perception with elimination of superimposition.

Behind Dharmottara, Dreyfus offers Subhagupta (650–750) as a possible source, with the caution that he mentions a single name where a longer lineage probably lies. Subhagupta, a critic of Dharmakīrti usually classified as Vaibhāṣika, distinguishes a first non-conceptual stage of cognition from a second, conceptual stage that imposes a false aspect on aggregated atoms, and unlike the usual Vaibhāṣika he does not deny that cognition has an aspect at all. Dharmottara likewise asserts two types of perception, though Dreyfus notes he might not have accepted Subhagupta’s account of how the aspect forms (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, pp. 363–364). [unverified]

The Gettier-like example

Seeking water on a hot day, one takes a mirage for water, goes to the spot and finds water there under a rock. The cognition was mistaken and the practical outcome was exactly the one sought. Dreyfus reads this as functionally identical to Edmund Gettier’s 1963 counterexamples to the justified-true-belief analysis: practical success and factual truth together are still not sufficient, and a normative condition, the cognition’s answering to the proper standards of evaluation, has to be added (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, pp. 292–293).

The example therefore constrains the pragmatic reading quoted above rather than supporting it, and Dharmottara is the source of both. sakya-chok-den resolves the tension by splitting the two notions: the mirage cognition is nondeceptive, since it is pragmatically adequate, and not valid, since the favourable outcome does not answer to what the person actually determined. Pragmatic nondeceptiveness is then necessary for validity and not sufficient (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 307).

Sources

  • dreyfus-recognizing-reality—ch. 16 (defining pramāṇa, the mirage case), ch. 17 (whether Dharmakīrti was a pragmatist), ch. 21 (A New Epistemology Begins: Dharmottara on Perception), ch. 22 (the Tibetan sequel)

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