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Dignāga on trairūpya Reconsidered: A Reply to Prof. Oetke
253
Thus I would like to conclude that Dignāga's purpose of inserting the particle eva in the second characterisitic is to restrict the domain of an inferential mark by that of what is similar to the object of inference (tattulya), which, I believe, gave the way to the formation of the theory of pervasion in Dignāga's logic. In any case, the second characteristic with the evarestriction expresses not the necessary but the sufficient condition for a valid inferential mark; hence, Dignāga felt it unavoidable to explain the necessity of the formulation of the third characteristic. I hope that the foregoing argument makes it clear why I referred to PS II. 21 in my 1983 paper, which has been questioned by Oetke (p. 70).
2.3. Objection 3: translation of the word 'asati' in the third char
acteristic Oetke (p. 65) says:
Despite the fact that the interpretation of năstităsati in the sense of "absence in what is not similar to it" is linguistically a very natural, perhaps even the most natural one in the given context it should be given up because of the undesirable objective consequences it involves. Thus the expression asati should not be taken as representing a participle of the copula 'to be', but as a negated present participle of the verb 'to be'
='to exist'.
Here Oetke is quite right in pointing out my misunderstanding of the expression asati. I simply followed Kitagawa's Japanese translation (p. 96): [ATIC] #3 DICITFLON EVL 53] (absence in what is not (tattulya)), though Hayes (1980: p. 252) correctly translated: "absent in their absence". In my new translation I accepted Oetke's criticism and adopted the meaning of 'in the absence' for asati.
Now the question is what is the logical subject of 'absence' in the third characteristic. Hayes seems to take it to be both anumeya and tattulya mentioned in the first and the second characteristics, which is perhaps the most
