Dignāga
Little is known about Dignāga's life. According to Taranatha, Dignāga was born to a Brahmin family near the city of Kanchi in around 470 or 480 CE and was ordained into the Vatsiputriya order at an early age by a monk named Nagadatta. Xuanzang states that Dignaga was active for a period in the Andhra country. At some point in his life, Dignaga became associated with the monastery of Nalanda. This sparse biographical record stands in stark contrast to the massive influence he would later exert on Indian philosophy. Scholars must piece together his existence from scattered references rather than detailed chronicles. The lack of concrete dates leaves historians to rely on estimates like the mid-5th century timeframe. Even the specific location of his birth remains a matter of historical reconstruction based on these few accounts.
Dignaga's mature philosophy is expounded in his magnum opus, the Pramana-samuccaya. In chapter one, Dignaga explains his epistemology which holds that there are only two instruments of knowledge or valid cognitions. These are perception or sensation and inference or reasoning. He writes that sensation has the peculiar attribute as its subject matter while reasoning has the general attribute as its subject matter. For Dignaga, perception is pre-verbal, pre-conceptual and unstructured sense data. It is a kind of awareness that acquires information about particulars and is immediately present to one of the senses. This cognitive process differs sharply from what he terms kalpana, which involves arranging or structuring raw data into complex forms. Our mind always takes raw sense data or particulars and interprets them or groups them together in more complex ways. Thus pratyaksa is only awareness of particular sense data such as a patch of green color and the sensation of hardness. It never becomes awareness of a macroscopic object such an apple which is always a higher level synthesis. According to Dignaga, errancy is only the content of misinterpretation by the mind. The object of awareness itself cannot be errant because it is the most basic and simple phenomenon of experience.
A central issue which concerned Dignaga was the interpretation of signs or the evidence which led one to an inference about states of affairs. Such examples include how smoke can lead one to infer that there is a fire. This topic of svarthanumana or reasoning for oneself is the subject of chapter two of the Pramana-samuccaya while the third chapter deals with demonstration for others. To obtain knowledge that a property is inherent in a subject of inference it must be derived through an inferential sign. Richard Hayes interprets these criteria as overly strict and sees Dignaga's system as one of rational skepticism. For Dignaga, the role of logic is to counter dogmatism and prejudice. As a weapon in the battle against prejudice that rages in every mind that seeks wisdom, there is nothing as powerful as the kind of reason that lies at the heart of Dignaga's system of logic. Very few of our judgments in ordinary life pass the standards set by the three characteristics of legitimate evidence. Taken in its strictest interpretation, none of the judgments of any but a fully omniscient being passes. Since there is no evidence that there exist any fully omniscient beings, the best available working hypothesis is that no one's thinking is immune from errors that require revision in the face of newly discovered realities.
Dignaga considered the interpretation of conventional and symbolic signs such as the words and sentences of human language to be no more than special or conventional instances of the general principles of inference. He takes up several issues relating to language and its relationship to inference in the fifth chapter of his Pramana-samuccaya. During Dignaga's time, the orthodox Indian Nyaya school and also Hindu Sanskrit grammarians had discussed issues of epistemology and language respectively. Their theories generally accepted the concept of universals which was rejected by most Buddhist philosophers. Influenced by the work of these thinkers as well as by Buddhist philosophers of the Sautrantika school who rejected Hindu theories of universals in favor of nominalism, Dignaga developed his own Buddhist theory of language and meaning based on the concept of apoha or exclusion. A word indicates an object merely through the exclusion of other objects. For example, the word cow simply means that the object is not a non-cow. As such, a word cannot denote anything real, whether it be an individual, a universal, or any other thing. The apprehension of an object by means of the exclusion of other objects is nothing but an inference.
The difficulty in studying the highly terse works of Dignaga is considerable because none of them have survived in the original Sanskrit. The Tibetan and Chinese translations which do survive show signs of having been done by translators who were not completely certain of the meaning of the work. This difficulty has also led scholars to read Dignaga through the lens of later authors such as Dharmakirti and their Indian and Tibetan interpreters as well as their Hindu Nyaya opponents. Because of this tendency in scholarship, ideas which are actually innovations of Dharmakirti and later authors have often been associated with Dignaga by scholars such as Fyodor Shcherbatskoy and S. Mookerjee. Dignaga's magnum opus, the Compendium of Epistemology, examined perception, language and inferential reasoning. It presents perception as a bare cognition devoid of conceptualization and sees language as useful fictions created through a process of exclusion. The work exists in two Tibetan translations. The Sanskrit text was initially thought to be lost by modern scholars, but then a manuscript of the commentary by Jinendrabuddhi was discovered. Modern scholars are currently working to extract and reconstruct the Sanskrit text of the Pramanasamuccaya from the commentary in which it is embedded.
Dignaga founded a tradition of Buddhist epistemology and reasoning, and this school is sometimes called the School of Dignaga or The school of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti. In Tibetan it is often called those who follow reasoning while in modern literature it is sometimes known by the Sanskrit pramanavada, often translated as the Epistemological School. Many of the figures in these were commentators on the works of Dignaga and Dharmakirti, but some of them also wrote original works and developed the tradition in new directions. The work of this tradition also went on to influence the Buddhist Madhyamaka school, through the work of figures like Bhavaviveka, Jnanagarbha, and Santarakshita. These thinkers attempted to adopt the logical and epistemological insights of Dignaga and Dharmakirti to defend the tenets of the Madhyamaka school. Dignaga's tradition of logic and epistemology continued in Tibet, where it was expanded by thinkers such as Cha-ba and Sakya Pandita. Dignaga also influenced non-Buddhist Sanskrit thinkers. According to Lawrence J. McCrea and Parimal G. Patil, Dignaga set in motion an epistemic turn in Indian philosophy. After Dignaga, most Indian philosophers were now expected to defend their views by using a fully developed epistemological theory which they also had to defend.
Up Next
Continue Browsing
Common questions
When was Dignaga born and where did he live?
Dignaga was born in around 470 or 480 CE near the city of Kanchi. He later became active in the Andhra country and associated with the monastery of Nalanda.
What are the two instruments of knowledge according to Dignaga's epistemology?
Dignaga holds that there are only two valid cognitions: perception or sensation and inference or reasoning. Perception is pre-verbal sense data while inference involves arranging raw data into complex forms through kalpana.
How does Dignaga define the meaning of words in his theory of language?
Dignaga developed a Buddhist theory called apoha or exclusion where a word indicates an object merely by excluding other objects. For example, the word cow means the object is not a non-cow rather than denoting anything real.
Which work contains Dignaga's mature philosophy on logic and epistemology?
Dignaga expounded his mature philosophy in the magnum opus known as the Pramana-samuccaya or Compendium of Epistemology. This text examines perception, language, and inferential reasoning across five chapters.
Who founded the School of Dignaga and what was its influence?
Dignaga founded a tradition of Buddhist epistemology sometimes called the School of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti. This school influenced the Madhyamaka school and set in motion an epistemic turn in Indian philosophy after him.