Formal and semantic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist debate logic

Abstract

What we shall term here "Tibetan Buddhist debate logic" or "Bsdus grwa logic", and which Stcherbatsky termed the logic of "sequence and reason" (thai phyir),1 was something very probably invented by the 12th century thinker, Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge (1109—1169): one says "probably" because no work of Phya pa survives, and in fact at this stage we can only conjecture that it was he who was responsible for its invention in his proto-bsdus grwa texts, the "epistemological summaries" (tshad ma bsdus pa)? From the fourteenth century on various schools, such as the Sa skya pa in particular, used debate-logic in their texts, but the foremost practitioners of this art were no doubt the followers of Tsong kha pa, the Dge lugs pa tradition. This debate-logic format, which consists largely of series of conse quences (thai 'gyur = prasanga) along the model of .. chos can . . . yin par thai. . . yin pa'i phyir" (". . . the topic, it follows that . .. , because . .."), is what one typically associates with the elementary manuals on epistemology and eristics known as "Collected topics" (bsdus grwa), although it should be stressed that it is far from the exclusive confine of Bsdus grwa manuals: most of the principal Dge lugs authors, such as Rgyal tshab rje, Mkhas grub rje, Chos kyi rgyal mtshan et al., regularly alternate between prose and debate-logic format in their more extensive commentaries on the meaning of canonical Indian texts.3 The actual Bsdus grwa manuals, though, seem to make their first appearance with the fifteenth century writer 'Jam dbyangs phyogs lha 'od zer (1429—1500), who wrote the Rwa stod bsdus grwa. Nonetheless, in terms of the concepts and terminology used, we see that almost all of Bsdus grwa's definitions and classifica tions were already given (in prose) in Tsong kha pa's (1357—1419) Sde bdun la 'jug pa 'i sgo don gnyer yid kyi mun sel and indeed most of the "lessons" do most likely go back to theories of Phya pa himself.4 'Jam dbyangs phyogs lha 'od zer and other Bsdus grwa writers' contributions, thus, were doctrinally fairly unoriginal, but consisted in