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Roger Jackson
The above speculations notwithstanding, Dharmakirti nowhere explicitly attributes omniscience to the Buddha 24a The verses we have cited ridicule as spiri. tually useless—if not impossible -omniscience in the sense of sarvākaraji:ată, and does not indicate that the Buddha's knowledge is, e.g. sarvajñatā-it is described only as pramāņa. Dharmakirti's definition of yogic perception (yogi pratyakşa ) is consonant with his definition of pramāna; unlike the definitions found in many Mahāyāna traditions, it is relatively “modest"--at least to the degree that it does not entail omniscience. What it does entail is a direct, unmistaken cognition of things as they are (bhūtārtha ).246 This is glossed by Dharmottara as the cognition of the four noble truths attained by a practitioner when he reaches the path of seeing, 25 and is said by Vinitadeva also to include knowledge of past and future objects36 – the former would seem more in tune with the tenor of Dharma. kirti's writings. Further evidence of DharmakIrti's view of omniscience is furnished by the fact that as McDermott notes “the term 'omniscient being often figures in Dharmakirti's logical writings as a mere substitution instance in certain specimens of modes of valid reasoning.....because 'omniscient being' is representative of a class of terms which refer to concepts of entities whose existence is problematic, in the sense that existence admits of neither confirmation nor disconfirmation via ordinary experience. Hence no apodictic conclusions can be drawn concerning such entities.2. For example, at Nyāyabindu III. 96., the use of “omniscient being" in a syllogism is said to lead to the fallacy of an uncertain reason.28
Although DharmakIrti (a) ridicules the spiritual value of omniscience at Pramānavārttika I.33-55, (b) gives no indication that yogic perception in any way entails omniscience and (c) cites an omniscient being as the type of problematic entity whose inclusion in a syllogism invalidates the inference, McDermott is right when she insists that Dharmakirti provides not a refutation of omniscience, but a nihil obstat; “Logic leaves open the possibility that an ompiscient being can exist in reality.29 This nihil obstat gave Dharmakirti's commentators a certain latitude, and the commentarial tradition gradually evolved to the point where, for example, the "pramānasiddhi" chapter of the Pramānavārttika was interpreted as actually containing proofs of omniscience in the broadest sense, as sarvākarajñatā. We will briefly-and by no means exhaustively-trace this evolution, from DharmakIrti's direct disciple Devendrabuddhi, down through Prajñākaragupta and rGyal tshab, to some contemporary Tibetans, and we will see in the process how, the further removed commentators were from the time of Dharmakirti, the more likely they were to maintain that he didn't really mean what he said.
III. Devendrabuddhi and Prajñākaragupta
The only chapter of his Pramānavürttika on which Dharmak Irti composed an auto-commentary was that op svārthânumāna." His direct disciple, Devendra
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