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Founders of Buddhist Logic and their Works





The Indian logic was spread over three periods:-

1. Ancient

2. Medieval and

3. Modern

The Indian logic founders and their works

Ancient	Medieval	Modern
Founder Book Time School	-Aksapada Gautama -Nayaya Sutra -2nd /3rd century CE -Nyāya School	- Dignāga - Pramāṇasamuccaya -5th/ 6th Century CE -Buddhist School	-Gangesa- Upadhayaya -Tattva-Cintamani -13th Century CE -Navya- Nyāya

Contribution of Dignāga in the history of Indian logic:-

Introduction: - In the history of Buddhist logic, the name of Dignāga occupies a prominent place. He was the founder of Buddhist logic and has been called “the father of medieval Nyāya’ as a whole. He lived at the beginning of the 5th century (480 -540) CE. According to the Tibetan sources he was born in Simha-Vaktra, a shrub of Kanchi (Kanchipuram) in the south, in a brahmin family. According to the Tibetan tradition, he took as his spiritual preceptor ‘Nagadatta of Vatsiputriya School, before being expelled and becoming a pupil ‘Vasubandhu’ Dignāga also went to the Nalanda Mahavihara where he defeated a brahmin logician named ‘Sudrajaya’ in a religious discussion. He is said to have died in the jungle of Orissa.

The Dignāga is credited with the authorship of about a hundred treatises on logic. Most of these are still preserved in Chinese and Tibetan translations. I-tsing says that Dignāga's treatises on logic were read as textbooks at the time of his visit to India. Among the most important works of the Dignāga is the ‘Pramāṇasamuccaya’ his greatest work and also many others.

Contributions of Dignāga:-

Dignāga is said to have revolutionized the entire course of Indian logic which has its beginning in Nyaya-sutra. His magnum opus Pramāṇasamuccaya is both a pathfinder as well a path breaker. Pramana-Samuccaya’ was the entire thinking of the Dignāga and gave a wide horizon to epistemological thinking. He gave a new meaning to many concepts and also invented new technical words for his logical system sva-laksana (the particular) and samanya-laksana(the universal) are the most notable contributions of the Dignāga to the treatises and history of Indian logic.



Some greatest works of the Dignāga are:-

1. Pramāṇasamuccaya (प्रमाण समुच्चय)

2. Alamban-pariksa (आलंबन परीक्षा)

3. Trikalya-pariksa ( त्रिकाल परीक्षा)

4. Hetu-cakra (हेतु चक्र)

5. Nyaya-mukha (न्याय मुख)

Pramāṇasamuccaya (Compendium of the Means of True Knowledge):-

It was a corrective and flawless interpretation of half Nyāya from a Buddhist viewpoint. It was an idealistic account and evolution of epistemology as against the realistic understanding of the phenomena. Pramāṇasamuccaya is the basic point of departure of Buddhist logic. Dignāga inherited inspiration as well as wisdom from his teacher Vasubandhu and composed Pramāṇasamuccaya. Dignāga examines and ruthlessly criticizes the argument of the Nyāya school. The conflict started between the Nyayaikas and Buddhist schools with the writing of Pramāṇasamuccaya. The conflict between Nyayaikas and Buddhists lasted uninterrupted six long centuries. The result of this long drawn conflict was the production of a vast amount of polemics literature

The seminal work on Buddhist logic and epistemology (pramāṇa) was composed in 247 verses by Dignāga. It comprises six chapters:

(1) Direct Perception (pratyakṣa) - 48 verses

(2) Inference for One's Own Benefit (svārtha-anumāṇa) - 51

(3) Inference for Another's Benefit (parārtha-anumāṇa) - 50

(4) Examination of Examples (dṛṣṭānta-parīkṣa) - 21

(5) Examination of Exclusion of the Other (anya-apoha-parīkṣā) - 52

(6) Examination of Universals (jāti-parīkṣā) - 25

This work was extremely influential throughout India. both within the Buddhist world and beyond, and its contents set the agenda for philosophical debate for many centuries after it was written. Unfortunately, only a few fragments survive of the original Sanskrit although a complete translation is available in Tibetan. The text was widely studied in Tibet until the translation of Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇa-vārttika superseded it in influence, except perhaps among the Nyingma School.

Dharmakīrti and his important works



Dharmakīrti was an Indian scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian philosophical logic. He was one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism, according to which only items considered to exist are momentary Buddhist atoms and state of consciousness. Dharmakīrti was born in a village named Tirumalai in the Cola country (South India). He was a Brahmin. The time period of Dharmakīrti dated back to the 6th/7th century CE. He was a successor of Dignāga and a logician of unsurpassed genius. He studied logic from Īśvarasena who was among din nag people Uppal people pupils. Later he went to Nalanda and became a disciple of Dharmapāla (530–561 C.E.) and became a teacher at the famed Nalanda University as well as a poet. His theories became normative in Tibet and are studied to these days as a part of the basic monastic curriculum. Dharmakīrti was an illusions disciple of the Dignāga. He was a faithful commentator of Dignāga. It is not that Dharmakīrti made only blindly followed Dignāga. Instead, Dharmakīrti made some corrections and added strength and force to the arguments with its methods. Dharmakīrti was one of the other great logicians of the Buddhist school.

The life of Dharmakīrti, a profound and rigorous philosopher of Indian Buddhism, is a subject of hagiography with little solid data upon which we can confidently rely. If we go by Tibetan sources, he seems to have been born in South India and then to have moved to the great monastic university of Nālandā (in present-day Bihar state) where he was supposedly in contact with other Buddhists luminaries, such as Dharmapāla. Tibetan sources describe his life in very colorful terms. Indeed some make him out as initially a Mīmāṃsaka who then broke with that non-Buddhist school; others depict him as extraordinarily skilled in debate and hint at a difficult and arrogant personality. Judging by the opening verses in his most famous (and by far his longest) work, the Pramāṇavārttika (Commentary on Epistemology), Dharmakīrti himself thought that his philosophy would not be understood by his contemporaries because of their small-minded vanity. At the end of the Pramāṇavārttika, he went further and prophesied that his work of unrivalled depth would never receive its proper recognition, but would age in obscurity locked away in itself.

It is still debated in the modern community of researchers on Dharmakīrti whether one should place this philosopher in the seventh century C.E. or in the sixth. Part of the reason for this indecision is that a significant time seems to have elapsed before Dharmakīrti achieved notoriety in India, although it is unclear how much. Erich Frauwallner came out strongly for 600–660 C.E. as Dharmakīrti's dates. One problem is that there may indeed be some counterevidence that would place Dharmakīrti a half-century earlier, inter alia his possible connections with Dharmapāla, a sixth-century idealist philosopher who, according to Tibetan historians, was the monk that ordained Dharmakīrti. Some have thought that there is even a reference to Dharmakīrti in Dharmapāla's commentary to Dignāga's Ālambanaparīkṣā (“Analysis of the object [of perception]”). However, because this commentary is only available to us at this time in Chinese in an unreliable translation by Yijing, it is not clear that the passage in question does in fact refer to Dharmakīrti. Caution or even agnosticism on the matter of Dharmakīrti's dates still seems to be warranted, although the scales seem to be tipping towards an earlier date. Krasser (2012) relies heavily on connections between Dharmakīrti, Bhāviveka, and Kumārila to push the dates of Dharmakīrti's activity back to the mid-sixth century CE.

Leaving aside the question of dates, Frauwallner (1954) did most likely pin down the order in which Dharmakīrti composed of his seven works, namely:

1. 1. Pramāṇavārttika,

2. 2. Pramāṇaviniścaya (“Ascertainment of Epistemology”),

3. 3. Nyāyabindu (“Drop of Reasoning”),

4. 4. Hetubindu (“Drop of Logical Reasons”), and

5. 5. Vādanyāya (“Logic of Argumentation”).

6. 6. Sambandhaparīkṣā (“Analysis of Relations”) and

7. 7. Saṃtānāntarasiddhi (“Proof of Other Minds”)

The Pramāṇavārttika is the largest and most important works of Dharmakīrti's. It is an unfinished, highly philosophical, commentary on the Pramāṇasamuccaya (“Compendium of Epistemology”) of Dignāga. At various key places in the text, we see that Dharmakīrti seems to have formulated some basic ideas as a reaction to now lost commentaries by Dignāga's students, the most important being the commentary on the Pramāṇasamuccaya by Īśvarasena. A notable reaction to Īśvarasena is Dharmakīrti's emphasis on certainty (niścaya). There are also innovations that, as far as we know, were not provoked by earlier commentators. Whether in metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of language, causal theories carry considerable philosophical weight. These theories are probably to quite a degree original, not found in Dignāga's own writings. In what follows, we will examine what we consider to be the most salient features of Dharmakīrti's philosophy, bringing out inter alia the importance of this causal stance. It is however impossible to discuss all the major themes that were traditionally commented upon by Buddhist scholastic writers on Dharmakīrti. Choices and exclusions had to be made.

Dharmakīrti's fame as a subtitle philosophical thinker and dialect was till recently shrouded in obscurity. Rahul Sankrityayan (9 April 1893 – 14 April 1963), is called the Father of Indian Travelogue Travel literature, has done incredible service not only to Buddhism but to Indian logic by Discovering in Tibet the original Sanskrit version of Pramāṇavārttika the magnum opus of Dharmakīrti.