Three Lectures on Dignāga—Shoryu Katsura (2007)
Three lectures given at Taipei, 21–23 June 2007, by Shoryu Katsura (Ryukoku University). Only Lecture 1 is held: “Dignāga on What Exists and How to Know It.”
Summary
Lecture 1 works through dignaga’s system as presented in the pramanasamuccaya in three movements: the state of Indian logic before him, his ontological presuppositions, and his theory of perception.
Key Arguments
Integration of the two traditions
Following Matilal, Katsura distinguishes two traditions of logic in classical India that had developed apart:
- Debate (vāda), running from the Brahmanical brahmodya through the Points of Defeat (nigrahasthāna) of the Carakasaṃhitā and the Nyāyasūtra to the Buddhist manuals: Upāyahṛdaya/Prayogasāra and Tarkaśāstra, attributed respectively to Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu and surviving only in Chinese; Vasubandhu’s Vādavidhi, Vādahṛdaya and Vādavidhāna, surviving only in fragments; Dignāga’s own Nyāyamukha, to which Śaṅkarasvāmin’s Nyāyapraveśa is an introduction (the text berzin-science-of-mind comments on)
- Epistemology (pramāṇa), from the Carakasaṃhitā’s five (verbal testimony, perception, inference, oral tradition, analogy) through the orthodox schools to Vasubandhu’s three in the Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya
The join is made by two new terms, svārthānumāna and parārthānumāna. By the trairūpya theory Dignāga could show that inference (anumāna), the property of the epistemologists, and proof (sādhana), the property of the debate manuals, come down to the same thing: inference is a mental process occurring to a cogniser, proof its linguistic formulation (prayoga). Katsura calls the combined system “epistemological logic”.
Where Dignāga takes only two pramāṇas he is following the Vaiśeṣikas rather than his Buddhist predecessors, who like the Sāṃkhyas accepted three; Pramāṇasamuccaya V argues that verbal testimony and the rest fall under inference.
Dignāga’s ontological stance
Katsura’s central negative claim is that Dignāga never discusses what really exists in the Pramāṇasamuccaya, and that the silence is strategic: he was presenting a logic that philosophers of any ontological background, Buddhist or not, could accept, and in the event most Indian schools did adopt its basic theories.
The background he brings to that silence:
- Initiated in the Vātsīputrīya tradition; later Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras, Yogācāra-vijñānavāda, and Brahmanical systems
- Deeply influenced by the Grammarian Bhartṛhari; the Traikālyaparīkṣā is nearly a copy of one section of the Vākyapadīya
- Sautrāntika for epistemology and logic, admitting external reality; Yogācāra-vijñānavādin at the ultimate level, as in the Ālambanaparīkṣā
He takes over Vasubandhu’s two levels of svalakṣaṇa, dravya-svalakṣaṇa (the real entity, the atom) and āyatana-svalakṣaṇa (the objective support: colour-form, sound and the rest), but not Vasubandhu’s use of them. Vasubandhu answers the Abhidharmakośa I objection—that the five sense cognitions take a whole (samasta) and therefore a universal, not a svalakṣaṇa—by saying their object is āyatana-svalakṣaṇa only, atoms being beyond sense cognition. Dignāga is not satisfied: sense cognitions take dravya-svalakṣaṇa too, since they are produced by aggregates of atoms, and it is with reference to their own objective supports that they can be said to take something common.
The Abhidharmic criterion of the two existences he does accept, as at Abhidharmakośa VI.4: destroy or analyse something and see whether its notion survives. The notion of a pot goes when the pot is broken, the notion of colour-form does not, so the pot is conventional (saṃvṛtisat/prajñapti) and colour-form ultimate (paramārthasat/dharma).
For conventional existence Katsura finds Dignāga adopting a Vaiśeṣika-like hierarchy of categories—substance, quality, action, universal—without inherence, which no Buddhist accepted as a real entity. He says the apoha theory presupposes exactly this hierarchy of commonly accepted categorical concepts (lokaprasiddhi), and defers the argument to the third lecture.
Perception: definition and classification
Dignāga’s definition is “a cognition free of conception” (kalpanāpoḍha), where conception is association (yojanā) with proper name, genus, quality, action and substance—the last four matching four Vaiśeṣika categories.
The classification runs: five sense perceptions; mental perception (mānasa), split into object-awareness and self-awareness; yogic perception; and self-awareness of concepts. Katsura’s summary tree nests the last two under mental perception rather than beside it, which does not sit easily with the flat list he gives earlier in the same lecture, nor with westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti (p. 224), which gives three kinds and has no place for self-awareness of concepts.
Mental perception sits between an initial sense perception and the conceptual determination that follows: object-directed and non-conceptual like sense perception, unmediated by an external sense organ like conception. Katsura does not defend it. We are not conscious of any such thing, it “seems to be a hypothetical assumption of Dignāga’s”, and dharmottara took it to be known “merely by scriptural tradition and not by logical proof”. The initial non-conceptual perception is, he adds, equally hypothetical, since by definition ordinary people cannot be aware of it.
Self-awareness (svasaṃvedana)
Katsura’s judgement is that self-awareness is Dignāga’s most important contribution to Buddhist epistemology, and he separates two usages:
- The result of cognition (pramāṇaphala). Cognition has two aspects, possession of the object’s form (the means) and awareness of the object (the result); or, put as two appearances (dvirūpa), that of the object (arthābhāsa) and that of cognition itself (svābhāsa), which Katsura relates to the Yogācāra grāhyākāra/grāhakākāra pair. Since perception’s object is its own appearance as object, the result can only be called cognition of itself.
- The operation of all cognition. Perception arises with the form of an object, so it is cognition of its own appearance, hence self-aware. Dignāga extends this to conception, which is how a feature of perception becomes a general principle covering every cognition. Dharmakīrti’s Nyāyabindu then identifies svasaṃvedana with self-awareness of all minds and mental factors.
The theory rests on sākāravijñānavāda, formally stated in the Ālambanaparīkṣā by two conditions on an objective support: it must cause its cognition (tadutpatti) and must resemble it in form (tatsārūpya).
Katsura notes that svasaṃvedana and svasaṃvedya occur in Buddhist literature before Dignāga, where they refer to the meditative awareness of Buddhist practitioners—a different use of the same word.
Fallacious objections and reductio
Kajiyama’s study of the Upāyahṛdaya concluded that Nāgārjuna could have written it, and, more importantly for Katsura, that its twenty legitimate arguments are exactly the reductio arguments Nāgārjuna practises. The Nyāyasūtra takes the same arguments—the prāptisama and aprāptisama pattern, that a pramāṇa makes nothing known whether or not it reaches its object, as a lamp illuminates darkness on neither alternative—and classifies them among its twenty-four fallacious objections (jāti). Katsura reads the Nyāyasūtra as treating Nāgārjuna as a dangerous opponent and rejecting his arguments as fallacious.
Dignāga rejects them too, on trairūpya grounds. He also declines reductio as a proof, because his proof formulae presuppose a topic admitted by both parties whereas a reductio topic is normally not accepted by the proponent—but he admits and practises it as a means of refutation (parihāra). Points of defeat get no special treatment from him; it is Dharmakīrti who handles them in full, in the Vādanyāya.
Scholars mentioned
dignaga, Vasubandhu, Nāgārjuna, dharmakirti, dharmottara, Bhartṛhari, Śaṅkarasvāmin; and among modern scholars Bimal K. Matilal, Yuichi Kajiyama, Ernst Steinkellner, Toru Funayama, Hakuju Ui.
Translation-relevant material
None. The lecture discusses the Pramāṇasamuccaya throughout but contains no verse translations from the Tibetan. A few Sanskrit verses and definitions are quoted (PS I.10 via Xuanzang, the definition of perception, the mental-perception passage from Steinkellner 2005: 3), all from secondary editions rather than from the Tibetan.
What is missing
Katsura defers three things to the two lectures we do not have: pseudo-reasons (savyabhicāra, viruddha) and the trairūpya theory to Lecture 2, and the apoha theory to Lecture 3. Since apoha and the three modes are the two places where this vault most needs Katsura, the held portion is the least useful third of the series for our purposes. Locating lectures 2 and 3 would be worth more than any further work on this page.
The page also does not follow the source-page template of docs//templates.md: it lacks source_type, location, concepts and texts in the frontmatter, and the body headings are its own. That is a conformance job, not a humanise pass, and wants a separate decision.
Sources cited within
- Steinkellner, Ernst (2005)—critical edition of Pramāṇasamuccaya I
- Funayama, Toru—the three standpoints from which Buddhist classifications of perception are made
- Kajiyama, Yuichi—the study of the Upāyahṛdaya