Alamban Pariksha

Author(s): Dinnaga, Dharmapala, N Aiyaswami Shastri
Publisher: Adyar Library

Page 11

PREFACE
The Alambanaparīkņā is one of the smaller treatises on the selected subjects composed by Ācārya Dinnāga, the father of medieval Indian logic. The treatise, as its title denotes, starts an enquiry about the true nature of the alambana, object of consciousness. The author, after a thorough examination of the standpoints of the Realists such as Vaibhāșikas, Vais'eşikas and others who hold the external things to be real, and proving their views untenable, establishes that the alambana, as it appears to us, is unreal and that consciousness alone is real-a dogma which has been held by his predecessors, Asanga and Vasubandhu, two eminent teachers of the Yogācāra school of Buddhism. The main contribution of Dinnāga to that school in his present treatise lies in putting the dogma on a logical basis.
This position of the author provoked a vehement protest from the dialecticians of the opposite camp, more specially Kumārilabhatta and Sankarācārya, two great thinkers and up-holders of the Brāhmanical tradition and culture. According to Yogācāras, only the pure consciousness appears into subject and object; and there exists, for them, nothing external apart from consciousness. What causes consciousness to arise is only its part known as grahyabhaga, knowable aspect, and