Dignāga (ཕྱོགས་གླང་)
Dignāga stands at the head of the Buddhist logico-epistemological lineage, which runs from Vasubandhu (his teacher) through his own disciple Īśvarasena to dharmakirti. Westerhoff dates him to 480–540 CE (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 217). What he did that nobody had done before was to fuse two traditions that had developed separately in India: the tradition of debate (vāda) and the tradition of epistemology (pramāṇa). Katsura calls the result “epistemological logic” (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
Westerhoff spells the name Diṅnāga; this page uses Dignāga throughout, as the vault does elsewhere.
Life
The traditional accounts have Dignāga ordained in the Pudgalavāda tradition, growing dissatisfied with their theory of persons, leaving his teachers, and eventually studying with Vasubandhu (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 217). Katsura specifies the Pudgalavāda school as the Vātsīputrīya and adds the rest of the curriculum: Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras, Yogācāra-vijñānavāda, and Brahmanical systems (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
The composition of the pramanasamuccaya comes wrapped in legend. Dignāga chalked the opening verse on the wall of his cave before going on alms-round; a non-Buddhist teacher called Kṛṣṇamunirāja rubbed it out, and did so again each time it was rewritten. The two finally met and debated. Dignāga won the debate but lost to Kṛṣṇamunirāja’s magical powers, which set his robes and belongings alight. He threw his chalk into the air, resolving to abandon the work for others’ sake once it hit the ground. It never did: Mañjuśrī caught it mid-air and told him the Pramāṇasamuccaya would become “the sole eye for all the other treatises” (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 217).
Bhartṛhari
Two sources independently record the debt to the Grammarian Bhartṛhari. Katsura calls Dignāga “much influenced” by him and notes that the Traikālyaparīkṣā is nearly a copy of one section of the Vākyapadīya (katsura-dignaga-lectures). Westerhoff puts it less politely: Dignāga “composed an entire treatise by lifting a set of verses from the non-Buddhist grammarian Bhartṛhari, changing a few words and adding his own dedication” (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 246). Westerhoff cites this as evidence of how fluid the boundaries between Indian philosophical schools still were up to the seventh century.
Survival of his works
Dignāga’s writings appear to have been thoroughly destroyed at the decline of Indian Buddhism, so that the Pramāṇasamuccaya and most of the rest survive through translation rather than in the original Sanskrit (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 218 n. 7, citing Warder). This is part of why the Tibetan tradition receives Dignāga through Dharmakīrti: where the root text had to be reconstructed, the commentary supplied the reconstruction.
Relation to Dharmakīrti
Root text and commentary do not make a monolithic doctrinal block. Westerhoff’s image is two overlapping circles: positions of Dignāga’s that Dharmakīrti does not share, positions of Dharmakīrti’s that are not Dignāga’s, and a large common area (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 218 n. 7). Points where the two come apart are marked below.
Contributions to Pramāṇa
- Exactly two means of valid cognition (ཚད་མ་, pramāṇa), perception (མངོན་སུམ་, pratyakṣa) and inference (རྗེས་དཔག་, anumāna), because there are exactly two kinds of object, the specifically-characterised (རང་མཚན་, svalakṣaṇa) and the generally-characterised (སྤྱི་མཚན་, sāmānyalakṣaṇa). Pramāṇasamuccaya V argues that verbal testimony and the rest reduce to inference (katsura-dignaga-lectures)
- The triple mark (trairūpya) of an acceptable reason, introduced to exclude reasons like wetness-of-ground, which admits causes other than rain: (1) pakṣadharmatā, the subject of the inference is characterised by the reason; (2) anvaya, at least one similar case (sapakṣa) carries both reason and probandum; (3) vyatireka, no dissimilar case (vipakṣa) carries the reason while lacking the probandum (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 226). The second and third conditions are what the two examples in a formulated inference establish
- Inference for oneself (svārthānumāna) and inference for others (parārthānumāna). The difference is not perspectival. Inference for oneself has two members, subject and reason; inference for others has three, adding the two examples. More importantly, the first is a sequence of psychological states, the second the proper linguistic form in which such a sequence is conveyed (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, pp. 227–228). This pair is the hinge on which the vāda and pramāṇa traditions were joined: by the triple mark Dignāga could show that inference (anumāna), the concern of the epistemologists, and proof (sādhana), the concern of the debate manuals, come down to the same thing (katsura-dignaga-lectures)
- Rejection of pramāṇasamplava, the mixing of epistemic instruments. Infer fire from smoke on a distant mountain, then climb it and see the fire: on Dignāga’s account this is not a second epistemic perspective on one fire, because perceived and inferred objects are of radically different kinds (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 234)
- The apoha theory of meaning, treated below
Perception
Dignāga describes svalakṣaṇa entities as free from conceptual construction (kalpanāpoḍha) and indescribable, since they are associated with no name. Perception “yields a total but unconceptualized, prelinguistic image of this object: perception does not determine or ascertain anything” (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 221). His definition is “a cognition free of conception”, where conception means association with proper name, genus, quality, action and substance; Katsura notes that the last four match four Vaiśeṣika categories (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
He criticises the Nyāya definition for building in the property of being inerrant (avyabhicārin), on the ground that this is already part of what it is to be a perception and so needs no separate mention (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 223).
Difference from Dharmakīrti. Dignāga does not include immunity from error (abhrānta) in his own definition, as Dharmakīrti does. Richard Hayes reads him as nonetheless holding that “cognition born of faculty–object contact is necessarily non-erroneous”, which is what makes the criticism of Nyāya coherent: non-erroneousness follows from what perception is, so stating it would be redundant. Westerhoff reports this as Hayes’s interpretation and adds that the position was not one Dharmakīrti shared (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 223 nn. 26–27, citing Hayes 1988: 139).
How many kinds of perception? The two sources do not agree. Westerhoff counts three: sensory, mental, and yogic (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 224). Katsura counts the five sense-perceptions plus three further kinds, mental perception (mānasa, itself split into object-awareness and self-awareness), yogic perception, and self-awareness of concepts, and gives a summary tree in which yogic perception and self-awareness of concepts sit under mental perception rather than beside it (katsura-dignaga-lectures). The discrepancy is partly one of counting and partly substantive, since self-awareness of concepts is the item Westerhoff’s three-way list has no place for. [unverified]—settling it needs Pramāṇasamuccaya I itself, not the two secondary accounts.
Mental perception falls between an initial sense perception and the conceptual determination that succeeds it: object-directed and non-conceptual like sense perception, but not mediated by an external sense organ, like conception. Katsura is blunt that we are not conscious of any such thing and that it looks like a hypothetical posit; he notes that dharmottara took it to be known “merely by scriptural tradition and not by logical proof” (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
Self-Awareness (svasaṃvedana)
Katsura’s judgement is that self-awareness (རང་རིག་, svasaṃvedana) is Dignāga’s most important contribution to Buddhist epistemology. The term is used in two ways (katsura-dignaga-lectures):
- As the result of cognition (pramāṇaphala). Cognition arises with two appearances (dvirūpa), that of the object (arthābhāsa) and that of itself (svābhāsa). Mapping the pramāṇa/prameya scheme onto this pair, the object of cognition is the object-appearance and the means is the appearance of cognition itself, so the result can only be cognition’s awareness of its own object-appearance.
- As the operation of all cognition. Since perception arises bearing the form of its object, it is cognition of its own appearance, hence self-aware. Dignāga extends this to conception, which is why every cognition whatever is characterised by self-awareness.
The second sense is what turns a feature of perception into a general principle, and it rests on Dignāga’s sākāravijñānavāda: the Ālambanaparīkṣā sets two conditions on an objective support, that it cause its cognition (tadutpatti) and that it resemble it in form (tatsārūpya) (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
Apoha and the Two Negations
Read as applying negation twice over, apoha looks redundant: the two would cancel. Westerhoff’s reconstruction is that the two negations are structurally different, so they do not cancel. First the non-implicative negation (prasajya-pratiṣedha) of the original set, then the implicative negation (paryudāsa-pratiṣedha) of that result. Implicative negation denies a property while presupposing that another of the same kind applies: to say a man is not a Brahmin is to imply he belongs to one of the other three castes. Non-implicative negation carries no such presupposition: a tree is not a Brahmin, and no caste follows. Applied to blue things, the first step yields the non-blue without the assumption that the non-blue are unified by an object-type; the second returns us to the blue things while that assumption stays discarded. The resulting “exclusion of what is other” (གཞན་སེལ་, anyāpoha) then does the work of an object-type without the ontological commitment to one (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, pp. 236–237).
The construction leans on a more general Buddhist intuition that absences are less real than presences. An empty table is both the absence of an orange and the absence of an apple, and what tells the two apart is only which one was expected; an absence is therefore individuated by the mind (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 235).
Causal power, which carries most of the weight in Dharmakīrti’s apoha, is almost entirely absent from Dignāga’s (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 237). The question Dharmakīrti uses it to answer is one Dignāga’s account leaves open: where does the original grouping of the blue things come from, if not from a property they share?
Doctrinal Neutrality
Hayes argues that the lineage of the logico-epistemological school moves progressively from open philosophical inquiry into the defence of Buddhist orthodoxy: Dignāga’s epistemology is phrased in a relatively neutral way, of the kind one would expect from a theory of medicine or grammar, and his successors integrate it ever more tightly with doctrine, using it to establish core Buddhist claims (the Buddha’s omniscience, rebirth, momentariness, the law of karma). Westerhoff reports the thesis but does not endorse it, finding the notion of “genuinely disinterested philosophical investigation” on which it rests “at least questionable” as a tool for understanding ancient Indian thought (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 246, reporting Hayes 1984: 665–6).
Ontological Stance
Dignāga presents no ontology in the pramanasamuccaya, which Katsura reads as deliberate: a system of logic acceptable to philosophers of any ontological background, Buddhist or not, and one that most Indian schools did in fact adopt. Later Indian Buddhists classified him among the Yogācāra-vijñānavādins; Katsura’s own view is that he works as a Sautrāntika in epistemology and logic, presupposing external reality in the Nyāyamukha and the Pramāṇasamuccaya, and as a Yogācāra-vijñānavādin at the ultimate level, as in the Ālambanaparīkṣā (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
He inherits from Vasubandhu two levels of svalakṣaṇa, dravya-svalakṣaṇa (the atom, a real entity) and āyatana-svalakṣaṇa (the objective support, colour-form and the rest), and does not simply accept Vasubandhu’s answer to the objection that sense cognition takes a whole as its object: sense cognitions take āyatana-svalakṣaṇa, he agrees, but also dravya-svalakṣaṇa, since they are produced by aggregates of atoms (katsura-dignaga-lectures).
Relationship to Abhidharma
Westerhoff reads the theory as a version of the Abhidharma project: svalakṣaṇa entities are the fundamental dharmas, and perception is the route of access to them. Conceptual construction (kalpanā, literally “ordering” or “arranging”) works only on groups of dharmas, assembling them into a property or an individual object. The consequence he draws is severe: on this account perception is never perception of tables and chairs (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, p. 221).
Reception in Tibet
Tibetan thinkers received Dignāga largely through Dharmakīrti. Dreyfus states his own scope in these terms: “This work does not deal extensively with [Dignāga], for the Tibetan thinkers important to my perspective have understood him mostly through the grid of [Dharmakīrti]‘s interpretations” (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, p. 1; square brackets restore names mangled in the OCR). Dignāga’s works were translated into Tibetan and studied directly, but that is not where the Tibetan debates take their bearings.
Sources
- westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti—life, epistemology, inference, apoha, and the school’s relation to Buddhist doctrine
- katsura-dignaga-lectures—the integration of the vāda and pramāṇa traditions, ontological presuppositions, the theory of perception, self-awareness. Only Lecture 1 of the three is held; the trairūpya and apoha material Katsura defers to lectures 2 and 3 is not available
- dreyfus-recognizing-reality—Introduction; used here only for the transmission to Tibet