- Length
- 480 pagesDunne, Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy, 2004 - study with translated passages
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Pramanavarttika
The most technically demanding book in Indian philosophy, and the one that took Buddhist analysis to its epistemological conclusion: that perception never reaches a general thing, that words never reach a particular one, and that these two facts are the same fact seen from either end.
- Date
- c. 600-660
- Author
- Dharmakirti
- Region
- Southern India; Nalanda
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1938 Sanskrit, Rahula Sankrityayan First printed edition, from manuscripts recovered in Tibet Attested
- 2004 English, John Dunne Study with substantial translated passages; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Commentary
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The core of the philosophical curriculum in Tibetan monasteries, where it is studied by formal debate, and increasingly read by philosophers outside Buddhist studies.
What the book says
Four chapters of verse, presented as a commentary on an earlier work and in fact a complete system of epistemology built from the ground up. Dharmakirti allows only two ways of knowing anything: perception, which is direct, wordless and grasps the particular; and inference, which is conceptual and never touches a particular at all. Everything else people claim as a source of knowledge - comparison, testimony, authority - reduces to one of these or fails. The consequences are severe and he follows them. What perception grasps is a momentary particular, unique and unrepeatable, and the moment it is named or recognised, conception has taken over and the particular has been left behind. So what do our general words refer to? Not to universals, which he denies exist, but to exclusions: the word cow means not-non-cow, a negative boundary drawn around a class by what it rules out. A long chapter argues that whatever exists must be momentary, on the ground that anything genuinely permanent could not produce effects at different times. Another examines what makes a teacher trustworthy and concludes that authority is worth nothing except where it can be checked. The book is dense, combative and unrelentingly technical.
What it argues
That there are exactly two sources of knowledge because there are exactly two kinds of object. The particular is momentary, causally effective and unrepeatable, and is reached by perception alone. The general is constructed, causally inert, and is what conception and language handle. Nothing is both, so no third source is needed and none is possible. The doctrine of exclusion follows: since there are no real universals for words to name, general terms work by ruling out - what all cows share is not cow-ness but the fact of not being anything else. And the argument for momentariness closes the circle: to exist is to be able to produce an effect, what produces an effect must do so at a time, and what is genuinely unchanging cannot be tied to any particular time.
What it answered
Nyaya Sutras c. 200Aksapada Gautama
Nyaya realism, and behind it every school that thought universals were found rather than made. The disagreement is as sharp as any in philosophy and the two sides had four centuries of it. Dharmakirti also answers within his own tradition, refining and in places correcting Dignaga, whose work he presents himself as merely explaining - a modesty nobody has ever taken at face value, since the system he builds goes considerably beyond his predecessor's.
What answered it
How to Make Our Ideas Clear 1878Udayana
Udayana and the later Nyaya, in the most technically formidable exchange Indian philosophy produced. The realists argued that exclusion cannot be the whole story about general terms, since to know what is not a cow you must already know what a cow is, and that momentariness makes memory and moral responsibility unintelligible. The dispute was still developing when Buddhism vanished from northern India, and the school of new logic that grew out of the Nyaya side carried the argument forward for centuries against an opponent no longer present to reply.
How it argues
By taking a rival position, granting it its own terms, and showing that on those terms it cannot state itself. The prose is unusually aggressive for the genre and the compression is severe; almost nothing can be followed without commentary. The form is nominally a verse commentary on Dignaga, which allows Dharmakirti to develop a whole system while appearing to explain someone else's, and which makes the boundary between exposition and innovation genuinely hard to draw.
The moment
Seventh-century India, with the great Buddhist monastic universities at their height and inter-school debate at its most institutionalised. Dharmakirti is reported to have believed his work would be neither understood nor preserved, and to have said so in a closing verse comparing it to a river disappearing into the sea. He was wrong about the preservation and possibly right about the understanding: his Indian influence was enormous and his readership was always small.
How it travelled
North rather than east. Unlike most of the Buddhist philosophical corpus, this text was never influential in China, whose Buddhist traditions took a different route; but it went to Tibet with the later transmission and became, with the Abhidharmakosa, the backbone of the monastic philosophical curriculum. It is studied there by formal debate to this day. Its Sanskrit survived, which is rare for a work of its period and school, and modern study in the West began seriously only in the twentieth century - later than for almost any comparable text.
The strongest objection
That exclusion is circular, which is what Nyaya said. If the meaning of a general term is the exclusion of everything it does not apply to, the speaker must already be able to sort the world into the excluded and the not-excluded, and that sorting is exactly what the theory was supposed to explain. Dharmakirti's answer appeals to causal dispositions - different particulars produce the same kind of judgement in us, without sharing any real universal - which shifts the work onto our cognitive machinery rather than onto the world. Whether that is an explanation or a relocation of the problem is still argued, and it is recognisably the same difficulty modern nominalism has.
Why read it
Only through a guide, and only if the problem interests you: there is no complete English translation, and the text is unreadable without commentary even in Sanskrit. Dunne's study is the usual English entry point. What it offers is the experience of watching a philosopher refuse every convenient move - no universals, no testimony, no enduring things - and build a working theory of knowledge from what is left.
- First printed
- 1938
- First in English
- 0
- Digitised
- Partial
Survives in Sanskrit, unusually for a Buddhist philosophical text of this period, as well as in Tibetan. Dharmakirti's own commentary on the first chapter is extant; the rest carries commentaries by Devendrabuddhi, Sakyabuddhi and Manorathanandin.
There is no complete English translation. Chapters and long passages have been translated in scholarly studies, all in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in two communities that have recently begun talking to each other. Tibetan monastic philosophy has never stopped working on it, and analytic philosophers of language have found the exclusion theory to be a serious and unfamiliar answer to the problem of universals - one arrived at without any of the moves the European debate made.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain; there is no complete English version and every partial translation is recent and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The dates are unfixed within about a century. The relation to Dignaga - how much is commentary and how much is a new system - is disputed, and Dharmakirti's own presentation of himself as an expositor complicates it. Whether his final position is a realism about external particulars or a form of idealism is the largest interpretive question, since he argues at different points in both registers; the tradition's answer, that he ascends through a sequence of provisional positions, is itself an interpretation. And whether the closing verse about the river is authentic or a later addition is disputed.