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Dharmakirtis's Attitude Toward Omniscience
parties, it is very difficult for a philosopher to take any side," yet take a side Singh. does' when he declares that The earlier theory...has got very scanty textual support," " and that the theory of omniscience as universal knowledge encompassing all substances with all their modes "is in keeping with the realistic tone and temper of the Jaina metaphysics. To the Jainas, there is no ambiguity in knowledge when. it comprehends the entire modes of all the entities, because the universe is an integrated system whose relations are equally real and objective."""
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While omniscience is an attribute of tirthankaras even in the earliest of Jaina texts-only the definition of the attribute has been debated-such is not case. with Buddhism, in whose earliest texts-presumably the Pali nikayas-the Buddha is nowhere described as omniscient. That this is so has been convincingly demonstrated by a number of recent scholars of the Päli canon, most notably K. N. Jayatilleke. In his Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, Jayatille ke makes a number of important points in this regard (1) In lists of the Buddha's epithets found in Pali literature, he is considered neither omniscient (sabaññu) nor all-seeing (sabba-dassavi) "until the very latest stratum in the Pali Canon and that is even after most of the books of the Abhidhamma had been completed"; (2) There are a number of places in the nikayas where the Buddha ridicules ascription of omniscience either to a divine being, like Brahma, who is said not to know some things that the Buddha. knows, or to a human teachers, who "is criticized on the grounds that his lack of omniscience would be evident from his actions. For instance he an enters empty house and receives no alms, a dog bites him, he meets a fierce elephant, horse or buil, has to ask for the names of people, of villages or hamlets or to find his way"; (3) The Buddha specifically disclaims continuous simultaneous knowledge of all events of all times wh en, at M.I. 482, he says that "those who say that the recluse Gotama. is omniscient and all-seeing and professes to have infinite knowledge and insight. which is constantly and at all times present to him, when he walks or stands, sleeps or keeps awake-are not reporting him properly and misrepresent him. (as claiming) what is false and untrue"; (4) What the Buddha does claim. M. I. 482 and elsewhere in the nikayas, is the threefold knowledge (evijja), which consists of unlimited retrocognition of his own rebirths, unlimited clairvoyance of the ways in which other beings die and take rebirth, and knowledge of the destruction of the "inflowing impulses" (asavas),1
The threefold knowledge represents the essential contents of the Buddha's enlightenment experience, and is therefore the epistemological basis of all his doctrines, from the four noble truths on. In this sense, it is similar in structure, if not incontent, to the "omniscience as knowledge of essentials" found in Jainism and the Vedantin sarvajña of Brahman upheld by Bharati. That the Buddha did not describe his knowledge as omniscience even of a limited sort is most probably due to the connotations the term had for him-at his time it must have referred chiefly to the
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