Pramāṇavārttika — Commentary on Valid Cognition
Dharmakīrti's pinnacle of Buddhist logic.
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EXPOSITION OF THE PRAMĀṆAVĀRTTIKA
Background
The Pramāṇavārttika is the great work of Dharmakīrti (600-660 BCE), a great master of the Mahāyāna Yogācāra school in the Northern Buddhist tradition. It is a detailed and profound commentary on the Pramāṇa treatise of Dignāga, the foundational work on the theory of knowledge and logic in Buddhism.
Dharmakīrti's period was a golden age of Indian Buddhism, when Buddhist scholars had to debate with Hinduism (Brahminism) in order to defend the Dharma. For this reason, the Pramāṇavārttika came into being to perfect a rigorous system of logic, giving Buddhist monks sharp tools of reasoning for debate and for clarifying the truth. This work became a classic of the Pramāṇika school and had a far-reaching influence on Northern Buddhist logic, especially in Buddhist universities such as Nālandā and in Tibet.
Main Content
The Pramāṇavārttika is divided into four main sections, corresponding to four functions of valid cognition (pramāṇa): direct perception (pratyaksha - direct cognition), inference (anumāna - reasoning), analogy (upamāna - example), and verbal testimony (śabda - evidentiary word).
The first section focuses on the causes, objects, and arising of direct perception - that is, how the discriminating mind step by step separates from external objects in order to arrive at pure knowledge, unpolluted by fabricated concepts. Dharmakīrti demonstrates that direct perception is not the essence of the object, but the mental reflection of sensory images - an idea consonant with Yogācāra philosophy.
The second section is the heart of the work: the theory of inference. Here, Dharmakīrti examines the three basic components of a valid argument: subject (paksa), reason (hetu), and example (drstanta). The reason must satisfy three conditions: it must exist in the subject, entail the conclusion in similar instances, and be absent in dissimilar instances.
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