[Buddha-l] Dignaga and Dharmakirti starring as Gog and Magog

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 19:24, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> But it is time to get back to our non-profound Buddhist squabbles. Feel
> like talking about Dignaga? What would you say to the idea that for Dignaga
> a pramana was basically something that made an artha available; that the
> notion of pramana as "justification" and validation developed subsequently,
> and was made a permanent fixture in the equation during Dharmakirti's day
> (though that had been developing during Dharmapala's time)?

All bets on Dignaga are off until I have had a chance to read the Sanskrit 
text of the Pramanasamuccaya that is dribbling out of Vienna. This semester I 
am reading the pratyaksa chapter with a team of graduate students, and I hope 
to turn my attention to chapters two and five later (which will give me an 
excuse to rewrite my book on Dignaga and publish it with an affordable 
publisher, perhaps in India). 

Meanwhile, Gillon and I are putting the finishing touches on our translation 
of and commentary to the svarthanumana chapter of Dharmakirti's 
Pramanavarttika. This has given us occasion to look at all the ways in which 
Dharmakirti "improved" Dignaga's system. (Dharmakirti improved Dignaga to 
about the same extent that the George Bushes improved Iraq.)

Having spent the best years of my life trying to understand Dignaga and 
Dharmakirti, I can now say with complete confidence that I have no idea at 
all what either of them was trying to accomplish. (Oh sure, I am willing to 
state my own prejudices and depict Dignaga as a philosophical clone of the 
senile Richard Hayes, and I am willing to portray Dharmakirti as a 
philosophical drone who totally misunderstood Dignaga and wrecked the 
elegance of his system, but those portrayals are based more on fantasies 
arising out of my neurotic love of drama than on solid scholarship.)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico