Spiritual Place Of Epistemological Tradition In Buddhism

Author(s): Ernst Steinkellner
Publisher: Ernst Steinkellner

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wa: meant to be supported by the former."(19) (my spacing)
Nagatomi rightly concludes that the epistemological methodology of Dignāga was intended “to articulate the nature of the Buddhist ways of knowing by translati ig their prototypes drawn from the Buddha's words into the vocabulary of epistemology, logic and semantics.''(20) He also has the right feeling about a reciprocity of he relation in question, but his interpretation of this reciprocity remains on the surface, and his statement that they, Dignāga and Dharmakirti, accepted the Buddha's words as authentic by faith comes as a considerable shock to the reacer who has just been informed by Hattori's words and Nagatomi's paraphrase that these philosophers did not accept an unconditional authority of the scriptures. Thus according to Nagatomi's explanation there is in fact no real reciprocity in the relation between "the Buddhist pramāņa system and the authenticity of the Bud Iha's words”. For his scheme means that a tool, the pramāna, is used to test the ralidity of the Buddha's words. But this testing is not taken seriously: Since the 'alidity of the tool is derived from the Buddha's words, Prof. Nagatomi thinks that these are only "meant to be supported by the former" (ibid.), their real authority being accepted by faith.
In short, this conception of the relation between the theory of valid cognitions and Buddhist revelation is insufficient. Is there a better one? Yes. Even though anot ier scholar, L.W.J. van der Kuijp, regrets in the beginning of another recent articie(21) that “the Pramāņavārttika and its position within the continuum of Buddhist philosophy which, despite the efforts of a handful of scholars, have not been adeq lately treated up to the present day" (6) and that “the position of logic within Budc hist philosophy and the answer to the question whether it should play a role in Buddhism at all has been ignored by Western scholars ..." (6; my spacing), his is not true at all.
Not only have there been clear answers as I tried to show in the beginning - vithout, for various reasons, - also asking the question --- but a fully acceptable xplanation of our problem has been elaborately presented by Tilmann Vetter in his book of 1964, Erkenntnisprobleme bei Dharmakirti.
Vetter's explanation, of course, is one of Dharmakirti's "profound re
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