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 was dates back to 6^th/7^th 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 poet. His theories became normative in the Tibet and are studied to these days as a part of basic monastic curriculum. Dharmakīrti was illusnous 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 strengthen and force to the arguments with its methods. Dharmakīrti was one of the other great logicians of 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 Buddhist 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 dialection 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.

 References

1.      https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dharmakiirti/.