Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy.

• Author: Siderits, Mark
• Position: Book review

Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy. By JOHN D. DUNNE. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: WISDOM PUBLICATIONS, 2004. Pp. xix + 467. $39.95.

Dharmakirti is one of the world's great philosophers. His accomplishments rank with those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Aquinas. It is thus deplorable that there has been no work available in English that makes his system accessible to those outside the small circle of Buddhologists who specialize in classical Indian and Tibetan philosophy. The title of Dunne's book suggests that it might fill that gap, and I will assess it from this perspective.

Dharmakirti was a seventh-century Indian Buddhist philosopher. He is renowned for having succeeded in systematizing much of the work of his predecessors in the Buddhist tradition. Buddhist philosophy before Dharmakirti (and his immediate predecessor Dignaga) had consisted largely of discussions on a set of core topics in metaphysics. Dharmakirti's great achievement lay in showing how these could all be integrated by using the theory of knowledge as an overarching framework. This means of proceeding was borrowed from orthodox ("Brahmanical") Indian philosophy (especially the Nyaya school). This move therefore facilitated a sustained dialogue between the orthodox Indian and Buddhist traditions, leading to the enrichment of both.

Dunne has chosen to explicate Dharmakirti's system by trying to clarify a small set of key Dharmakirtian doctrines: the ontology of particulars and universals, and the semantic theory of apoha that is meant to bridge the gap between the two categories; the doctrine of the "nature-connection" (svabhava-pratibandha) that is meant to explain how inference is possible; and Dharmakirti's account of the validity of the means of knowledge. These are all good choices, and for the most part Dunne's discussions succeed in helping the reader grasp the overall logic of the system. Take, for instance, his discussion of Dharmakirti's ontology. Buddhists generally maintain that only the particular is real. So given a herd of cows, Buddhists would deny that the herd exists over and above the individual cows. They also deny that there is a universal cowness that is equally present in each of the cows. But when this view is applied consistently and across the board, it leads to the difficulty that each real thing is utterly unique; there are no real resemblances among things, and nothing shares a nature with anything else. This makes it a mystery how we can use language to achieve our aims in the world. For language use depends on our ability to employ a single word-type, such as 'cow' or 'red', to refer to many distinct things. As Dunne makes clear, Dharmakirti seeks to solve this problem by showing how universals like cowness, while mentally constructed and so not objectively real, are indirectly tied to unique (and thus inexpressible)...