Dharmakīrti

Abstract

The Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (between mid-sixth and mid-seventh centuries CE) is one of the most significant and challenging thinkers in India’s history. Next to his predecessor Dignāga (b. c. 480–d. 540), from whom he was separated by one scholarly generation, he counts as one of the two main founding figures of an intellectual tradition within Buddhism that focused on the analysis of knowledge and reasoning; in South Asia this tradition was active for approximately 700 years. It is also called the logico-epistemological or pramāṇa school of Buddhist philosophy, pramāṇa being the Sanskrit term for a “means of valid cognition”—a source of knowledge—the central concept of Classical Indian epistemology at large. Dharmakīrti is the product of, and, in turn, helped shape, a diverse religio-philosophical landscape populated by Buddhist, brahminical, Jaina, and other traditions that interacted with one another through constructive, but also critical engagement in an atmosphere fueled by socio-religious competitiveness. Within Buddhism, Dharmakīrti’s ideas significantly relate to views regarded as characteristic for the Sautrāntika school of thought. He also facilitated reformulations of Yogācāra and Madhyamaka doctrines, in part through the formulation of influential proofs in the philosophy of mind. Beyond Buddhist circles, they were subjected to fierce criticism, but they were also selectively adopted by Jainas and within Śaivism. Dharmakīrti adopted Dignāga’s system prescribing two, and only two means of valid cognition, perception, and inference, that respectively, apprehend different types of objects, the unique particular and the universal. But he also addressed historically new problems, ventured into new areas, and induced shifts in perspective. Among others, he formulated an ontology of particulars grounded in their causal efficacy and purely momentary existence, developed Dignāga’s nominalist theory of universals and concepts as being constructed through a process of exclusion (apoha), outlined a distinctive method for determining causation, and devised methods for ascertaining nonexistence. In the realm of logic, Dharmakīrti’s distinctive and rigorous theory of inference ultimately grounds the soundness of reasoning in ontological relations and restricts the realm of acceptable reasons to three types. Unlike Dignāga, Dharmakīrti also articulated a distinct Mahāyānist philosophy of religion striving to offer a rational account of the Buddhist path, its foundations, and its goals, which recent scholarship has argued to be closely related to key elements of his epistemology and logic. Beyond South Asia and Sanskritic philosophy, Dharmakīrti’s thought and its later Indian developments exerted a powerful influence on Tibetan intellectual history, where theories and methods that ultimately go back to his works remain a part of monastic curricula even today, especially in the Sakyapa [Sa skya pa] and Gelukpa [Dge lugs pa] schools.