Pramāṇasamuccaya

Exposition of the Pramāṇasamuccaya

Background

The Pramāṇasamuccaya is the greatest work of Dignāga (480-540), the great Indian sage regarded as the father of Buddhist logic (of the Buddhist Yogācāra school). This is the foundational work of the Buddhist school of methodology, inheriting the tradition of thought of Dharmakīrti and Vasubandhu, while also developing independent advances in logic and epistemology.

This treatise was written in the sixth century, a period when Mahāyāna Buddhism was flourishing in India. Dignāga lived and studied at the famous university of Nālandā, where leading Buddhist scholars gathered. This work was translated into Chinese by Xuanzang in the seventh century and became an important classic in the Northern Canon, especially in the studies of the Yogācāra and Madhyamaka schools.

Main Content

The Pramāṇasamuccaya gathers arguments concerning valid means of cognition (pramāṇa), understood as instruments for attaining true knowledge. According to Dignāga, there are two basic pramāṇas: direct perception (pratyakṣa) and inference (anumāna).

Direct perception is knowledge arising from the direct action of objects upon the senses and consciousness, without the mediation of concepts or words. It is the foundation of all knowledge, but in itself it has limits because it apprehends only manifest phenomena (sākāra).

Inference is the process of logical thought based on signs and marks (liṅga) in order to infer objects that are not directly perceived. Dignāga develops a three-part system of argument (Traikālaparīkṣā): thesis (pakṣa), reason (hetu), and example (dṛṣṭānta), constructing a complete Buddhist logic.

Dignāga also argues that other forms of knowledge, such as language, analogical reasoning, or spiritual intuition, are not independent pramāṇas but derivative forms of the two basic pramāṇas.