Marginalia To Dharmakirtis Pramanaviniscaya I II

Author(s): Christian Lindtner
Publisher: Christian Lindtner

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Marginalia to Dharmakirti's Pramāṇaviniscaya
intelligible than ever before in Buddhist tradition. To be sure, Dignāga was not the first to use the epithet pramāṇabhuta of Bhagavat but when he revived the term in the sense of "pratyaksa in person" the demands of his system gave it an interpretation without precedent 29. This innovation solved some old problems but also created new ones hardly foreseen by its author and his commentator. Here is an interesting field for future research.
The importance of bhāvanābala within this scheme now emerges clearly. It is generally agreed that bhāvanā possesses the power to transform or "digest" anything - be it real or unreal - so that it is clearly intuited without conceptual constructions 30. It is the power of habitual meditation that makes things familiar and obvious. It is the task of critical philosophy (yukti- cinta) to secure that only scientific facts are presented to be digested by bhāvanā. It derives its inspiration from agama. Philosophical critique thus becomes ancillary to religious experience. If we credit Vasubandhu with having created a system of vijñānapariņāma we may as well credit Dignaga (followed by Dharmakīrti) with having created one of *pramāṇapariņāma31, so to speak.
In view of its cardinal importance in his system it may seem surprising that Dharmakīrti does not devote much space to justify the role
29 See HATTORI, op. cit., p. 23 with n. 3 and ERNST STEINKELLNER, The Spiritual place of the Epistemological tradition in Buddhism (= Nanto Bukkyō 49 [1982]). The meaning of the epithet comes out clearly in a fragment to which STEINKELLNER has drawn attention in his Philological Remarks on Śākyamati's Pramāṇavārttikaṭīkā (Studien zum Jainismus und Buddhismus. Gedenkschrift für Ludwig Alsdorf, 1981, p. 290):... bhāvanābalaniṣpannanirmalāvikalpābhrāntajñānātmakatvad bhagavataḥ pratyakṣapramāņasvabhāvatā sākṣād asty eva... In his interpretation of Dignaga's verse and Dharmakirti's commentary (i. e. the pramāņasiddhi chapter of PV) STEINKELLNER (following VETTER) fails to clarify the distinction between Bhagavat as a sāmvyavahārika- and as a pāramarthika-pramāņa.
30 See e. g. PV III, 281-287 and Kambala's Alokamālā (known to Dharmakīrti) 57-60; 117-118, etc. In both authors bhāvanā and abhyasa are used interchangeably.
31 This point is decisive for an adequate interpretation of almost any technical term in the epistemological system. Correct knowledge (pramāņa, samyagjñāna) changes from having an object to having no object, from being conceptual (indirect) to being non-conceptual (direct), from being simple sensation to being pure intuition. The deliberately oscillating vagueness of terms such as arthakriyasamartha, avisamvada, svalakṣana, etc. is easily understood once it is recognized that they have to apply to all four kinds of pratyakṣa, etc. and, consequently, shift their meaning accordingly. Without being too general or too specific NB I, 1 summarizes the system of pramaṇapariņāma with unmatched brevity and comprehensiveness: samyagjñānapūrvikā sarvapuruṣārthasiddhir iti...