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Dharmakīrti's school of thought

#1
C C Offline
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dharmakiirti/

EXCERPT: The life [biography] 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.

[...] 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.

He was wrong about that, fortunately for us. His philosophy certainly did find recognition, at least it did in many parts of Asia. He, and his predecessor Dignāga (c. 480–c. 540 C.E.), were responsible for a school of Buddhist thought that actually had no name in Sanskrit, although in Tibetan it was known as “those who follow reasoning” (rigs pa rjes su ‘brang ba); in modern literature it is sometimes known by the convenient Sanskrit misnomer pramāṇavāda, or more simply, “the Epistemological School.”

In any case, it is the Buddhist school that provoked the most sophisticated and most important philosophical debates with non-Buddhist rivals. It represented Buddhism in the pan-Indian debates on problems of universals, philosophies of logic and language, and issues of justification, and had an enormous influence on Mahāyāna Buddhism in Central Asia, especially in Tibet. Finally, although its influence was relatively limited in medieval China (only a few of the works of Dignāga were translated into Chinese, none of the works of Dharmakīrti were translated), it has nonetheless become increasingly important in modern Japan in supplying the epistemology for Buddhist thought....
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#2
Yazata Offline
My fall/winter project is to read Amber Carpenter's rather weighty Indian Buddhist Philosophy, (2014, Routledge). Chapter 8, about the highly scholastic sixth and seventh centuries in India, devotes quite a bit of attention to the philosophical arguments between the Nyayayikas and Dignaga and to Dignaga and Dharmakirti on apoha theory.

Apoha theory is an extremely nominalistic theory of meaning that tries to escape from the Hindu Nyayayika pramanavada's Platonic-style understanding of meaning in terms of universals. The Buddhists feared that embracing the understanding concepts and meanings in terms of universals would threaten their later highly-elaborated no-self doctrines, that applied not only to the human self but had become a kind of anti-essentialism that applied to reality as a whole. So they felt that they needed to create a theory that explains how general concepts can exist and function in the absence of universals, in that most fleeting of nominalisms, a Buddhist abhidharma inspired trope-ontology of instantaneous and particular psycho-physical events.

http://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/..._final.pdf
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