Spiritual Place Of Epistemological Tradition In Buddhism

Author(s): Ernst Steinkellner
Publisher: Ernst Steinkellner

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within Buddhism. Dignāga's program contains the idea of a philosophical foundation of Buddhism, understood as human practice orientated by the words of the Buddha. Historically this means nothing else but that Buddhism, too, takes its part in that general philosophical development in India, from about the 3rd and 4th century A.D. onwards, that is characterized by an ever increasing interest in problems of dialectics, logic, and general epistemology.
The motive for such interest essential to our context can be found for the first time in the epistemology of the Sāmkhya-teacher Vrsagana(25) from the beginning of the 4th century A.D., according to Frauwallner. Vrşagaņa seems to have been the first in India not only to consider epistemology as a prerequisite for the elaboration of his systematic philosophy, but also to establish his system mei hodically on, and by means of, this epistemology by creating a theory of inference which was such that the actual inferences used as a philosophical tool permitted the argumentative derivation of the system's metaphysical principles.
Already this case of Vrsagana shows what is valid for all other epistemological traditions, too: that the respective epistemology is developed, being linked up with the philosophical system. That — in other words — there is in India no emancipation of epistemology from the respective systematic ideas, and that epistemology nowhere becomes a positive science" in the sense of Th. Stcherbatsky.
The Buddhist tradition of epistemology and logic thus presents another clear example of the relativity of epistemological thought. Buddhist epistemology turns out to be related to a certain order of the values and goals that govern human practice; it therefore cannot be investigated and evaluated without reference to this order, as if it were separated from it. The epistemological achievements of this Bud lhist tradition thus not only have their truly deserved position in the general history of Indian philosophy, and so of the history of the human mind, but also in the l istory of Buddhism as a religion.
APPENDIX. I : A translation of T. Vetter, Erkenntnisprobleme bei Dharma
kirti. Wien 1964.
p.27
"The means of valid cognition have to procure cognition for action. The