DIGNĀGA

An Indian proponent of the YogĀcĀra school about whose life little is known, Dignāga (ca. 480–540 c.e.) is renowned as the initial formulator of Buddhist logic. In his most important work, PramāṄasamuccaya (Compendium on Reliable Knowledge), Dignāga examines perception, language, and inferential reasoning. Dignāga maintains that perception is a pre-conceptual bare apprehension of real things, and that perception is therefore devoid of all conceptual activity. Language, in contrast, involves concepts, but concepts are actually fictions created through a process of "exclusion" or apoha. In other words, the concept blue appears to correspond to some real sameness that all blue things share (their blueness), but in fact, that sameness is a fiction constructed through excluding everything that is irrelevant. This position allows Dignāga to deny that concepts (such as self) correspond directly to real things in the world.

Dignāga's views on perception and language were highly influential for subsequent Buddhists, but his greatest influence lay in his analysis of inferential reasoning. Unlike previous Indian thinkers, Dignāga keenly distinguished between the reasoning used in debate and the underlying rational structure of all inferences. Focusing on the relation between inferential evidence (such as smoke) and that which it is meant to prove (such as fire), he presented a systematic taxonomy of the cases where that relation holds or fails. This analysis supports his famed formulation of the three aspects of all valid evidence.

Although an important innovator in the history of Buddhist philosophy, Dignāga was soon superseded by DharmakĪrti (ca. 600–670 c.e.), whose presentation of Buddhist logic was adopted by subsequent Buddhist thinkers in India and Tibet.

Bibliography

Hattori, Masaaki. Dignāga, On Perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Hayes, Richard P. Dignāga on the Interpretation of Signs. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988.

John Dunne