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Roger Jackson
type of universal omniscience he eschewed for both himself and others, whether because he found it impossible of attainment, empirically unverifiable or irrelevant to the spiritual path he propounded. The Buddha's own caution notwithstanding, not many centuries after his parinirvāna the majority of his followers had come to regard him as omniscient in the broadest possible sense, and to this day the majority of orthodox Buddhists, both Theravādin and Mahāyānist, believe the Buddha to possess (or to have possessed) universal omniscience.
At the same time, just as in Jainism more than one possible definition of omniscience came to be offered, so too in Buddhism have there been alternative definitions. The Abhisamayā!amkāra of Maitreya, for example, which spawned a huge commentarial tradition in later Indian Mahāyāna and among the Tibetans,14 has as three of its eight principal subjects the three kinds of omniscience (tisraḥ sarvajñatāh). These are: (1) omniscience regarding all aspects of existence (sarvākarajñatā), which is defined as "The ultimate knowledge (of the Buddha), the direct cognition, in one single moment, of all the aspects of existence, empirical and absolute”15, (2) omniscience regarding the path (mārgajñatā), which is defined as “The intuition of the Mahāyānist Saint, dominated by analytic wisdom, directly cognizing the essential nature, the non-substantiality, of the 3 different Paths to Salvation"16; and (3) omniscience regarding all empirical objects (sarvajñatā), which is defined as "The knowledge of the Saint which corresponds to the Hinayānistic spiritual family and consists, in its predominant part, of the direct cognition of all the separate elements of existence as being devoid of a relation to an individual Ego or soul."17 Within the context of the dbhisamayālamkāra's exposition of the path to enlightenment, the two latter types of omniscience clearly are intended as preparatory to sarvākarajñatā, yet, if defined somewhat less rigorously than by later commentators, they may be seen to represent other, "limited” interpretations of omniscience that may have been current in the Buddhist world. Indeed, as Charlene McDermott notes, there is, in fact, a school of Buddhist epistemology (post-dating Maitreya) that “distinguishes (and concentrates upon) sarvajñatā, or omniscience vis a' vis the direct intuition of the truths necessary for salvation, from sarva-sarvajñatā(sarvākarajñatā), or omniscience without restriction.18 The school she has in mind is that of Dharmak Irti.
II. Dharmakirti's Attitude Toward Omniscience :
Tibetan siddhānta writers classify DharmakIrti as a Yogācârin Following Reasoning. As a Yogācārin, he is a Mahāyānist, and as a Mahāyānist, he might be assumed to subscribe the then prevailing Mahāyāna interpretation of omniscience as sarvākarajñatā. Yet, despite the fact that rGyaltshab glosses the subject-matter of the pramāṇasiddhi chapter of the Pramāņavārttika as “an explanation of liberation and omniscience and the path leading to them,"19 it is by no means clear from
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