Dharmakirti on the Duality of the Object: Pramanavarttika III 1-63.

• Author: Pecchia, Cristina
• Position: Book review

Dharmakirti on the Duality of the Object: Pramanavarttika III 1-63. By ELI FRANCO and MlYAKO NOTAKE. Leipziger Studien zu Kultur und Geschichte Sud- und Zentralasiens, no. 5. Berlin: LIT-VERLAG, 2014. Pp. xv + 173. [euro]24,90.

Dharmakirti (sixth to seventh c. CE), an Indian philosopher who belonged to the Buddhist epistemological tradition, is one of the few names of Indian philosophers that appear on title pages of books. Indeed, he highly influenced the course of philosophy in South Asia and the legacy of his thought continued in Tibet, where his works were accurately translated from the Sanskrit. Tibetan translations were the only sources for accessing Dharmakirti's ideas up to the 1930s, when, among other documents, Rahula Sahkrtyayana discovered manuscripts bearing the Sanskrit text of Dharmakirti's Pramanavarttika ("Commentary on the Pramdna[samuccaya]," hereafter PV) and the commentaries thereon composed by Prajnakaragupta and Manorathanandin. For many decades his pioneering editions of these three texts (1938, 1938-40, and 1953 respectively) (1) together with Raniero Gnoli's critical edition of the first chapter of the PV (1960), which exceptionally adds prose to verse, have constituted the textual basis of Dharmakirtian studies.

As it is well known, and as is often the case with pioneering works, Sankrtyayana's editions have to be revised. Dharmakirti on the Duality of the Object is thus a particularly welcome publication, and the authors Eli Franco and Miyako Notake have to be congratulated for having undertaken the difficult task of presenting for the first time a critical edition and annotated English translation of a substantial section from the third chapter of the PV (devoted to direct perception, pratyaksa). Their work reconsiders verses 1-63 of PV III in the light of the extant manuscript evidence (see Watanabe 1998, vol. 1, and Kellner/Sferra 2008) and of an array of literature on Dharmakirti's philosophy that includes Hiromasa Tosaki's outstanding Japanese translation and contextual edition of the entire PV III. Eli Franco's introduction presents the issues that Dharmakirti discusses in the verses under examination, their background, and the commentators' take on them. Franco's overview is based on his understanding of the text's structure (pp. 1-4), which differs from Miyako Notake's. Her 2011 article "Dharmakirti's Argument over the Universal in the Third Chapter of the Pramanavdrttika, vv. 11-50" is thus an important complement to the work under review. The last section of the introduction (pp. 24-26) provides details about the text's witnesses and the contents of the apparatus. The book is appended with a useful index of Sanskrit terms by Franco and introduced with verve by Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer's foreword. Here, the philosopher points out the wider philosophical context in which Dharmakirti's reflection can be considered, namely "the question how a particular object of perception can be the cause of its sensation" (p. viii), and observes how "[t]he deep...