Illuminating the Mind
An Introduction to Buddhist Epistemology
JONATHAN STOLTZ
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stoltz, Jonathan, author.
Title: Illuminating the mind : an introduction to Buddhist epistemology / Jonathan Stoltz.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Series: Buddhist
phil for philosophers series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020046592 (print) | LCCN 2020046593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190907532 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190907549 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190907563 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of (Buddhism) | Knowledge, Theory of—India. | Knowledge, Theory of—China—Tibet Autonomous Region. | Intellect—Religious aspects—Buddhism.
Classification: LCC BQ4440 .S86 2021 (print) | LCC BQ4440 (ebook) | DDC 181/.043—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046592
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046593
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190907532.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Preface
It is not uncommon for me to be asked—either by my students or by nonacademic acquaintances—who my philosophical heroes are. As common as the question is, I invariably struggle to give a satisfactory response. Regardless of the philosopher, my first impulse is to find fault with his or her views. It could very well be that this struggle stems from my belief that it is far easier in philosophy to be wrong than it is to be right. This hesitation with respect to identifying my philosophical heroes should not be taken as evidence that I do not appreciate the works of earlier philosophers. Even among the accounts of those philosophers with whom I am inclined to disagree vigorously, there are many cases in which I am nothing short of in awe of the authors’ argumentative acumen and philosophical creativity.
My first deep exposure to what is now commonly called “analytic philosophy” came as an undergraduate student, from reading numerous articles on the philosophy of logic and mathematics by (among others) W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam. I did not necessarily agree with the conclusions that Quine and Putnam reached, but I was captivated by their approach to philosophy and the style of their writing. I could say the same in reference to philosophers like David Lewis and Timothy Williamson, whose writing I was first exposed to in graduate school. I am far from persuaded that they get the right answers in their respective writings, but the rigor of their philosophical analyses has long struck me as truly remarkable. In short, what I’ve learned to appreciate most in philosophy is not the writing by thinkers whose views I take to be correct, but the writing that I take to be the most argumentatively rigorous and creative.
At the top of my list of philosophers whose writing impresses me the most is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German logician, Gottlob Frege. His style of writing epitomizes the argumentative rigor that I take to be central to analytic philosophy. Yet there is much to disagree with in Frege’s writing. Take, for instance, the opening two sentences of his truly excellent work The Foundations of Arithmetic:1
After deserting for a time the old Euclidean standards of rigour, mathematics is now returning to them, and even making efforts to go beyond them. In arithmetic, if only because many of its methods and concepts originated in India, it has been the tradition to reason less strictly than in geometry, which was in the main developed by the Greeks.
Even when I first read this passage, I could see that Frege was revealing his ignorance of Indian intellectual history. It is true that many arithmetic concepts originated in India, and also true that the axiomatic proof system of geometry was popularized in ancient Greece. But Frege was also insinuating—though, admittedly, not directly stating—that the methods of reasoning in (ancient?) India are not as rigorous as those in Greece. It is this presumption that, even as a twenty-two-year-old graduate student, I knew to be mistaken.
During my years as a graduate student pursuing a PhD in philosophy, and while immersed in the analytic tradition of philosophy, I was simultaneously exploring the Indian tradition of philosophy—and, in particular, the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions of logic and epistemology. Historical Indian treatises on logic and epistemology are undoubtedly more tersely written and more stylistically rigid than are writings in the Greek tradition of philosophy, but Indian philosophy is no less argumentative in tone or content than Western philosophy, and it certainly grapples just as intensely with many of the same questions. In this respect, it is beyond question that the Indian intellectual tradition and its thinkers reason no less rigorously than do European philosophers.
One of my overarching goals as a philosopher working in the area of Buddhist philosophy has always been to show readers that the themes addressed (and arguments made) by Buddhist philosophers are just as relevant and incisive as are the themes (and arguments) put forward by philosophers in the Western tradition of philosophy. I use the word show in the preceding sentence because I do not believe it to be necessary to argue that, let alone prove that, the writing by Buddhist philosophers contains insightful arguments on themes that are relevant to contemporary philosophy. In this regard, I adopt a perspective slightly different from that held by the late University of Oxford philosopher B. K. Matilal. As Matilal noted in his excellent book on Indian philosophy, Perception:2
I have sometimes faced, rightly I believe, the criticism that there is a little “leaning over backwards” in my writings to show the analytic nature of Indian philosophy. I accept the criticism and can only say that this gesture is needed to correct persisting misconceptions, and sometimes remove ignorance.
In my view, there is no need to lean over backwards in order to demonstrate the analytic tendencies of Indian philosophy or Buddhist philosophy. I do want readers to see that Buddhist epistemology shares much in common with contemporary analytic epistemology, including a reliance on sharply argumentative reasoning. But I do not believe that one must lean over backwards in order to show this.
In this book I will be providing readers with an introduction to Buddhist epistemology—an introduction that is foremost written for those who have some familiarity with “Western philosophy,” including epistemology, but little or no knowledge of Buddhist philosophical thought. While the topics in this book should be of interest to, and accessible to, persons with backgrounds and/or interests in Indian philosophy and Buddhist intellectual thought, the book presupposes no background knowledge of Indian Buddhism, let alone Buddhist epistemology. Given these two points, in calling this An Introduction to Buddhist Epistemology, the term “Introduction” is applied more directly to the Buddhist part of “Buddhist epistemology” than it is to the epistemology side of the topic.
Because the central aim of this book is to make the themes and arguments of Buddhist epistemology accessible to philosophers and students of philosophy who have little or no familiarity with Buddhist philosophical thought, I have deliberately chosen to structure this book around a series of prominent themes in the field of contemporary epistemology. In other words, I have pursued a “topical approach” to writing about Buddhist epistemology. This topical approach stands in contrast to the perhaps more common “historical approach” to writing about a given philosophical tradition. Authors who adopt a historical approach generally structure their books in a more or less chronological order and tend to focus individual chapters on the contributions of specific philosophers or time periods.
It is my firm belief that the most fruitful way by which to communicate the power and relevance of Buddhist epistemology to those whose primary training and background is in the European and Anglo-American traditions of philosophy is by adopting a topical approach. I want to show
readers that, for example, just as contemporary analytic epistemologists are concerned with issues like the problem of skepticism, the status of testimonial knowledge, and disputes about epistemic luck, so, too, were Buddhist epistemologists worried about these same matters.
Be that as it may, arranging this book into chapters devoted to specific epistemological themes is not a wholly unproblematic endeavor. There can be reasonable concerns about pursuing a topical approach—an approach that pulls Buddhist philosophical arguments and debates out of their textual and historical contexts and then repackages those arguments into neatly formed chapters dedicated to specific themes. I believe those concerns to be well-founded, and I acknowledge that a deeper understanding of Buddhist epistemology can be achieved by being attentive to the development of philosophical theories within their historical context. Such a historical treatment of Buddhist epistemology, including an examination of the gradual changes to philosophers’ views over time, would be well worth the reader’s time once a foundational understanding of Buddhist epistemology has been secured. But as an introductory work on Buddhist epistemology, and one whose primary audience is persons trained in the Western tradition of philosophy, I believe that a topical approach provides the most fruitful point of entry to the Buddhist tradition of epistemology.
Of course, even if one is accepting of a topical approach to Buddhist epistemology, there can be disagreements about what the most relevant topics are to be covered. As can be seen from the chapter titles in this volume, I have focused on a set of themes that I take to be central to both Anglo-American epistemology and Buddhist epistemology. While I believe that this is right and proper, it would also have been possible to provide a topical approach to Buddhist epistemology that zooms in on a very different set of philosophical themes. Within classical texts on Buddhist epistemology, the authors develop a range of philosophical views, not only on matters pertinent to epistemology but also on issues of ontology, logic, and language. Insofar as this is the case, it is not uncommon to see some modern scholars of Buddhist philosophy focus largely or entirely on these latter topics when writing about the Buddhist tradition of epistemology.3 This approach may be rooted in the view that “Buddhist epistemology” refers to a specific historical school of thought—one that is linked to a specific group of texts and a commentarial tradition, sometimes now referred to as Pramāṇavāda wherein any and all philosophical questions taken up in those texts are accepted as a part of “Buddhist epistemology.”
To cite a more specific example of this phenomenon, in various writings about the Buddhist tradition of epistemology one can find scholars focusing on the Buddhist theory of exclusion (apoha), which is a prominent topic in Buddhist philosophy—one relevant to core questions about the nature of language and its connection to reality. But though the topic of exclusion is an incredibly important one in Buddhist philosophy, and though the topic is indeed developed by classical Buddhist epistemologists, it is not, at its core, an epistemological thesis. The Buddhist theory of exclusion is something that would most properly be addressed in an introductory book on Buddhist philosophy of language or philosophy of mind.4 The point that I am making about the Buddhist theory of exclusion is just one example among many that could be cited.
I believe that we should understand the scope of “Buddhist epistemology” differently. On the view presented in this book, Buddhist epistemology is an area of philosophical investigation that is demarcated by a range of themes intimately connected to questions about the nature and scope of knowledge. It is true that these themes are foremost addressed in Pramāṇavāda texts, but it is not the case that all topics addressed in those texts are inherently epistemological. An author’s theory of, for instance, perceptual knowledge may very well be impacted by that author’s ontological commitments, but it is important to distinguish these ontological concerns from those that are more properly epistemological. In this book, I have tried to distill the most important epistemological themes from the Buddhist tradition of epistemology, and I have been careful not to let these epistemological topics get overwhelmed by the surrounding questions of metaphysics, language, and mind.
Above all else, this book seeks to introduce Western-trained philosophers to the field of Buddhist philosophy. I hope that the chapters that follow succeed in giving philosophers and students of philosophy a deeper understanding and appreciation of Buddhist contributions to the field of epistemology, and that this understanding is accompanied by a recognition that Buddhist epistemology is neither philosophically vapid nor inscrutable to those who have been trained exclusively in the Western tradition of philosophy. If these hopes go unrealized, the fault is entirely my own and not due to any failure of the Buddhist philosophers discussed herein.
There are far too many people for me to thank than can be acknowledged here. Because Buddhist epistemology is, as readers will soon see, an investigation into the instruments or sources of knowledge, it would be appropriate for
me to acknowledge the people who played instrumental roles in my journey within the fields of philosophy and Buddhist studies. First, I’d like to thank my undergraduate advisor, Jeffrey Turner, who introduced me to the field of philosophy. I’d also like to thank my doctoral advisor, James Cargile, who pushed me for years to be a more critical thinker (as well as a better teacher). Thanks also go to Hubert Decleer and Andy Quintman, who were the directors of the Tibetan Studies study abroad program that introduced me to the field of Buddhist studies and, indirectly, to Buddhist logic and epistemology. Additional thanks should go to David Germano and others affiliated with the University of Virginia and its Center for South Asian Studies, who were willing to “invest” in me during my years as a graduate student through the support of multiple U.S. Department of Education FLAS fellowships. Were it not for that early financial support, my study of Tibetan language and of Buddhist epistemology texts could never have happened. Most importantly, I’d like to thank my wife and best friend, Sarah, for everything that she has done.
1 Preliminaries
According to traditional Buddhist teachings, a root cause of suffering is ignorance (avidyā);1 and the core goal of Buddhism is the elimination of suffering. It is, therefore, imperative to combat ignorance. Knowledge is the antidote to ignorance.2
When confronted with a choice between knowledge and ignorance, most people would choose the former; we do, after all, value knowledge. And yet it must be recognized that knowledge is not easily obtained. Attaining knowledge requires, in many cases, the collection of evidence, or of good reasons, or of justification; and these can be incredibly difficult to acquire. It is much easier simply to glide through one’s life without worrying about annoying things like evidence and justification. At the same time, it is said that knowledge is power and, owing to a belief in that edict, societies have pushed for the education of their children and the education of their workforce. The acquisition of knowledge can be costly and time consuming, but the reward for being a knowledgeable person is among the most prized in contemporary society.
With what confidence, however, can I assert the various claims in the preceding paragraph? I claim that knowledge is valued, that knowledge often requires evidence or reasons, that knowledge is power, and that knowledge comes from education. But how can I make these claims? Do I need to know what knowledge is before I can know whether knowledge is valued? Do I need to know what knowledge is before I can know whether knowledge can be attained through education? In everyday life, assertions of knowledge flow relatively freely. Informed assertions about the nature of knowledge, however, are more delicate and call for deeper philosophical exploration.
The study of knowledge, its nature, and its scope has long been at the heart of European philosophy. Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato grappled with the questions of how knowledge is obtained and how it is different from mere true opinion. He also explored the relationship between knowledge and teaching/learning. One way to interpret Plato’s broad message in the Meno, which is among his most important dialogues on the topic of knowledge, is
Illuminating the Mind. Jonathan Stoltz, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190907532.003.0001
as a proclamation that knowledge does not come from teaching. Teaching, at best, can only give rise to true opinion. The acquisition of knowledge, according to Plato, requires the “tying down” of our opinions by giving “an account of the reasons why.”3 This process of tying down, or justifying, our beliefs does not, on Plato’s account, come directly from others. Instead, justification is a process that he believes must take place inside oneself. In this respect, teaching cannot transmit knowledge from a teacher to her students. It can only transmit true beliefs that, when reflectively engaged by those students, can be tied down and thus transformed into knowledge.
The theory of knowledge in ancient India has no less central a place within that culture’s tradition of philosophy than it does in the ancient Greek tradition. Philosophers in ancient India were deeply concerned with questions concerning how knowledge is obtained—that is, what the principal sources of knowledge are—and the conditions under which a person’s beliefs and experiences can be said to yield knowledge. Within the Indian tradition, it was widely acknowledged that the acquisition of knowledge can serve to dispel ignorance, and Indian philosophers likewise recognized that organized reflection on the nature of knowledge serves to illuminate the mind. Buddhist philosophers in the first millennium of the Common Era, steeped as they were within the larger Indian tradition of philosophical discourse, explored questions of knowledge with the same intensity and sophistication as did their non-Buddhist counterparts in India. Philosophical reflections on knowledge were undoubtedly carried out by a great many Buddhist scholars throughout the first thousand years of Buddhist writings in India. But it is finally in the lifetime of the sixth-century Buddhist thinker Dignāga that we can safely identify a sustained and systematic exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of knowledge, and thus the beginning of a field of study fittingly called Buddhist Epistemology.
The aims of this opening chapter are threefold. One purpose is to provide a brief overview of what is meant in this book by “the Buddhist tradition of epistemology” and of how I shall be interpreting the relevant scope of that tradition. In so doing, the reader will also gain a better sense of the relationship between Buddhist epistemology and the broader Indian tradition of philosophy. A second goal is to introduce readers to some of the most fundamental terms and concepts that are deployed in writings on Buddhist epistemology and to call attention to the similarities and differences between the relevant Sanskrit terms and those that are employed within contemporary Anglo-American accounts of the theory of knowledge.4 The third aim, one
that pervades the entirety of the chapter but which is not as directly articulated as are the first two goals, is to begin the project of putting the subject of Buddhist epistemology in conversation with some of the core themes and ideas associated with the contemporary analytic tradition of epistemology as it is pursued in much of Europe and English-speaking parts of the world. This conversation will take place throughout the book, but this chapter begins that process by highlighting some of the most foundational terms and concepts that will undergird the themes and puzzles addressed over the remainder of the book.
1.1. Two Histories
1.1.1. Buddhist Epistemology
This book offers an introduction to and exploration of Buddhist epistemology. There is, to be clear, no single set of mutually compatible claims that makes up the totality of Buddhist epistemological speculation. Instead, Buddhist epistemology, like its contemporary Anglo-American counterpart, consists of a number of competing theses and interpretations, internal debates and factions. Some foundational claims are, as readers will see, widely agreed upon and have remained integral to Buddhist epistemology for a millennium or longer. Other ideas and theories about the nature of knowledge were developed only later in the Buddhist epistemological tradition and/or were contested by various factions within that tradition. For example, views that were accepted by Buddhist epistemologists in the seventh century may not have been adopted by writers in the ninth century. Distinctions that were operative (and terminologies that flourished) in the eleventh century may have been nonexistent within earlier strands of Buddhist epistemological discourse. We should, therefore, not assume that there is any single set of claims that can definitively be called “the Buddhist account” of the theory of knowledge.
Even more pertinently, ostensibly incompatible epistemological theses are sometimes found not just among different Buddhist philosophers but also within the set of claims put forward by a single philosopher. In particular, many contemporary scholars of Buddhist philosophy are now convinced that the claims and arguments that are put forward by individual Buddhist epistemologists can reflect multiple—and seemingly
incompatible—metaphysical accounts of the nature of reality; and these differing metaphysical assumptions can have an impact on how certain epistemological theses are to be understood. As will be seen more clearly in chapter 3, while Buddhist epistemologists frequently endorse, or at least presuppose, a version of external realism, those same philosophers occasionally shift to an idealist framework when addressing certain epistemological puzzles. This shift from one metaphysical framework to another has been described as capturing Buddhist philosophers’ proclivity for “ascending scales of analysis.”5 Given that a single thinker’s epistemological theory may, in one context, require an external realist interpretation of objects and, in other contexts, an idealist interpretation, this makes it difficult to speak, unequivocally, of that philosopher’s theory of, for example, the nature of perceptual knowledge.
Keeping these initial points in mind, this book proceeds under a rough classificatory rubric in which Buddhist epistemological writings are grouped into four time periods (see Table 1.1). The most important period is that which runs from the time of Dignāga (c. 480–540 CE) in the first half of the sixth century through the time of his most famous “commentator,” Dharmakīrti (c. 550–650 CE), who flourished likely around the first half of the seventh century. I shall often refer to this as the period of “classical Buddhist epistemology” and at other times as “Dharmakīrtian epistemology.” It constitutes the most significant time period within the Buddhist epistemological tradition, and the writings by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti are the ones that are most central to Buddhist epistemological discourse.
Buddhist discussions of knowledge before the time of Dignāga shall be termed “pre-Dignāgan Buddhist epistemology” and constitute the earliest period of Buddhist reflections on knowledge. This period includes Buddhist teachings on knowledge and ignorance that were composed in the centuries immediately following the life of the historical Buddha, and it extends into the first five centuries of the Common Era. Included in the pre-Dignāgan period are the treatises expressing skepticism of the whole project of epistemology that were composed by Nāgārjuna in the early centuries of the Common Era, as well as the substantive claims about knowledge contained within texts written by the philosopher Vasubandhu in the fourth or fifth century.
The period of Buddhist epistemological theorizing in India after the time of Dharmakīrti shall be referred to as “post-Dharmakīrtian Indian Buddhist epistemology.” This time period, spanning from the seventh century to the
Table 1.1
Philosopher
Pre-Dignāgan Period
Nāgārjuna
Vasubandhu
Classical Period
Approximate Dates
Second or third century
Fourth or fifth century
Dignāga 480–540
Dharmakīrti 550–650
Post-Dharmakīrtian Period
Devendrabuddhi 630–690
Śākyabuddhi 660–720
Vinītadeva 710–770
Śāntarakṣita 725–788
Kamalaśīla 740–795
Dharmottara 740–800
Prajñākaragupta 750–810
Jinendrabuddhi
Eighth or ninth century
Śaṅkaranandana 940–1020
Ratnakīrti
Mokṣākaragupta
Early Tibetan Period
990–1050
Eleventh or twelfth century
Ngog Lotsawa 1059–1109
Chaba Chokyi Senge 1109–1169
Sakya Paṇḍita 1182–1251
twelfth century, includes many figures, and it reflects a range of developments on (and modifications of) the theories that had been put forward by Dignāga and (especially) Dharmakīrti. The most fruitful segment of time in this period appears to have been the eighth century, during which time numerous (still extant) epistemological works were composed. Among the most important Buddhist figures writing about epistemology in the eighth century were Vinītadeva, Śāntarakṣita, Kamalaśīla, and Dharmottara.
The fourth and final period of Buddhist epistemology discussed in this book is the tradition of “early Tibetan epistemology” that developed in central Tibet from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.6 Though this period is in many respects an extension of the post-Dharmakīrtian period of Buddhist epistemology, it will be classified separately owing to the fact that once this Tibetan tradition of epistemology took hold, many of the most important
arguments that were debated by Tibetan epistemologists had only tenuous ties to the earlier Indian tradition of epistemology. Despite the fact that Tibetan epistemology was based on Dignāga’s and (especially) Dharmakīrti’s foundational texts, that tradition’s distance from its Indian predecessors allowed for the flourishing of a great many philosophical and terminological developments that departed—sometimes rather sharply—from the range of views attested within Indian Buddhist epistemological texts.
To be clear, in each of the four periods noted earlier, texts on Buddhist epistemology did not arise within a cultural or intellectual vacuum. The Buddhist tradition of philosophical scholarship in India was situated within the larger Indian tradition of philosophical speculation, and the key philosophers within the Buddhist epistemological tradition were, in nearly all cases, both aware of and influenced by the debates, theories, and terminological conventions that permeated Indian philosophical discourse. Among the most important non-Buddhist “schools” of Indian philosophy that impacted thinkers like Dignāga and Dharmakīrti were the Nyāya School of reasoning and the Mīmāṃsā School of hermeneutics. Also influencing Dignāga were the works of Indian grammarians such as the circa fifth-century scholar Bhartṛhari.7 As will be seen later in this chapter and in various places in later chapters, it is not possible to make sense of, let alone appreciate the significance of, a great number of key concepts and claims in Buddhist epistemology without framing those claims within the broader Indian context out of which they arose.
Dignāga and Dharmakīrti are, as has been stated earlier, the two most significant and foundational thinkers within the Buddhist tradition of epistemology. Dignāga’s Compendium of Knowledge (Pramāṇasamuccaya)—and his auto-commentary on that root text—is so important that it is spoken of as the “sūtra” of Buddhist epistemology. Ostensibly, this text by Dignāga synthesizes the scattered claims about knowledge that he had made in various earlier works. Dharmakīrti, writing several generations after Dignāga, is famed for his seven texts on epistemology that comment on and clarify (or expand upon) the claims made in Dignāga’s works. Of those seven texts, his two longest treatises, the Commentary on [Dignāga’s Compendium of] Knowledge (Pramāṇavārttika) and the Ascertainment of Knowledge (Pramāṇaviniścaya), are of such importance that they should be regarded not just as the most important texts on Indian Buddhist epistemology but as among the most important works on epistemology in the history of philosophy. In the centuries that followed Dharmakīrti’s life, these texts would be the subject of
numerous commentaries by subsequent Buddhist philosophers—a tradition of commentarial literature that has continued into modern times within Tibetan Buddhist monastic institutions.
1.1.2. Analytic Epistemology
As an introduction to Buddhist epistemology, one primary goal of this book is to elucidate Buddhist accounts of knowledge in such a way that those accounts are accessible to students and scholars of Anglo-American philosophy who have little or no familiarity with Indian philosophical thought. The central themes within the Buddhist tradition of epistemology will be brought into a fruitful dialogue with contemporary themes in epistemology as those themes are taken up within universities across Europe, North America, and much of the rest of the world. In particular, the predominant scholastic approach toward the theory of knowledge over the past half century is that which may be called analytic epistemology.
Just as the Buddhist epistemological tradition that springs from the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti has its roots in earlier Indian philosophical thought, so, too, the contemporary analytic tradition of epistemology that is now predominant in academic departments of philosophy has its roots in earlier philosophical traditions in Europe. The origins of analytic epistemology go back to ancient Greece and pass through much of Europe, but this tradition of epistemology finds its contemporary trajectory guided by developments taking place largely within British and American universities such as Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Pittsburgh in the middle part of the twentieth century. Key figures in this tradition of epistemology include philosophers such as A. J. Ayer, W. V. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Roderick Chisholm. These philosophers, together with their direct and indirect students, refined a series of pressing problems in the field of epistemology and cultivated a well-respected method of philosophical analysis for addressing those problems.
Following the publication of Edmund Gettier’s three-page-long 1963 essay, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” the trajectory of analytic epistemology was altered so as to accommodate a new series of debates concerning the nature and analysis of knowledge. Some philosophers see the post-Gettier period of analytic epistemology as the golden age of epistemology, whereas others regard this period as one of misguided intellectual pretension. What is
undeniable is that the study of epistemology has been dramatically changed by Gettier’s 1963 article. The epistemological questions that are emphasized, the ways in which those questions are framed, and the ways in which those questions are answered have been indelibly altered by Gettier.8
Though Buddhist epistemology and analytic epistemology are situated within larger philosophical traditions that are temporally and geographically remote from one another, it is possible to put these two traditions in conversation with each other. Many of the most significant epistemological themes are shared between these two traditions, and some of the biggest problems in analytic epistemology were likewise puzzled over by Buddhist epistemologists. This book aims to give a voice to Buddhist epistemological thought so that it can be better appreciated by those whose familiarity with the theory of knowledge is currently limited to contemporary analytic epistemology and its Western predecessors.
1.2. Core Terms and Concepts
Giving a voice to Buddhist epistemology, and putting it into conversation with contemporary analytic epistemology, is an exercise fraught with challenges. After all, the central questions of epistemology as it has developed in the Western tradition are grounded in historical exchanges and chains of disputation that have proceeded over many hundreds of years in European (and later in American and Australasian) countries. Ruminations on the theory of knowledge in the Indian Buddhist tradition are not merely temporally and spatially remote from those in the Western tradition, however. They are also linguistically distant, for Buddhist epistemological works were traditionally composed in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is indeed part of the Indo-European family of languages, and there are linguistic links between, for example, the English word “know,” the Greek (to Latin) root “gno-”, and the Sanskrit root “jñā-”. Nevertheless, the distinctive semantic roles played by terms having these roots in the Anglo-American tradition of epistemology developed largely independently from the roles played by the comparable terms in the Indian tradition. As a result of these distinct cultural and philosophical developments, it is far from easy to identify philosophically adequate equivalencies for the key epistemological terms found in the Anglo-American and Indian traditions.
The Anglo-American tradition of epistemology that springs from figures like Plato and Aristotle emphasizes a reason-based conception of knowledge. As mentioned earlier, Plato conceives of knowledge as being associated with the tying down of beliefs or opinions by giving an account of the reasons why something is true. For Aristotle, this reason-based understanding of knowledge gets blended with his theory of logical argumentation and the idea of demonstrative reasoning. Beliefs can be said to be “tied down” to the extent that they can be situated as conclusions of demonstrative proofs. This general approach toward knowledge has been passed down over the centuries and forms the basis for the twentieth-century idea that knowledge is inextricably linked to providing evidential support or justification.
In particular, the notion of justification grew to take on an especially weighty role within the twentieth-century analytic tradition of epistemology. As one prominent epistemologist wrote in 1985, “The concept of epistemic justification is clearly the central concept in the whole theory of knowledge, and this book is largely devoted to exploring in detail certain of its facets and ramifications.”9 I have my doubts about the truth of this claim, let alone its obviousness, but perhaps that is because I am inclined to adopt a broader perspective of “the whole theory of knowledge” than does the author cited. Ironically, since the time that the aforementioned book was published, debates within analytic epistemology have shifted quite a bit, and a sizable number of philosophers now reject the assumption that justification needs to play, or even should play, such an integral role. In its place have come other important concepts such as warrant and reliability. 10
I raise these points because, as will be argued in much more detail in the next chapter, there does not appear to be any single term in Sanskrit, nor any single concept in Indian or Buddhist epistemology, that is the exact equivalent to that of justification. Knowledge, as described by Buddhist epistemologists, may very well require more than a mere true belief, but what is required is not formulated in terms of something comparable to justification. This does not mean, of course, that the Buddhist tradition of epistemology is conceptually impoverished. Instead, if anything, it suggests that analytic epistemology’s emphasis on developing a theory of justification is a narrowly constrained approach to characterizing knowledge. As has been stated by Jonardon Ganeri in a recent work on Indian epistemology, “It would thus be wrong to translate pramā as knowledge, and then to wonder what counts as justification in the Sanskrit model. The answer is that nothing
does, because justification is a parochial feature of a way of thinking rooted in English lexical quirks.”11
Ganeri’s point is an important one, but we need to be careful not to take his thesis too far. After all, the Anglo-American emphasis on providing something like evidence or reasons in support of one’s beliefs does have very close parallels within the Indian tradition. To the extent that epistemological theorizing is linked with argumentative reasoning, Indian philosophers— both Buddhist and non-Buddhist—are keen to emphasize the importance of grounding inferences (and arguments) in evidence or reasons. Buddhist epistemologists are likewise committed to the idea that successful inferential reasoning depends on an appeal to some sort of logical reason or piece of evidence. In this regard, Buddhist accounts of inferential knowledge have strong affinities to the reason-based conception of knowledge found in Western epistemology. This appeal to evidence in inferential reasoning will be addressed at length in chapter 4.
Ordinarily, when analytic epistemologists speak of justification and reason-based epistemology, it is tied to the view that the items needing justification—the very things that need to be supported with reasons—are mental states of belief. Though there are certainly well-entrenched logical applications of the terms “justification” and “reason,” ones that apply to statements or propositions, what is typically at stake in discussions of epistemological justification are not mind independent entities like statements or proposition, but rather the mental states of a given individual—for example, person S’s belief that p. Some of the beliefs that humans hold have well-reasoned support and others may not have such support, but it is generally granted that knowledge depends on the possession of beliefs—beliefs that are supported with reasons or justification.
In the Indian context, the relevant counterpart to “belief” is the Sanskrit term jñāna. A jñāna is an episode or event of mentation—and, more specifically, an episode of cognition. Though the term jñāna has the same etymological roots as the English word “know,” and though cognates of the word jñāna are used in languages such as Hindi, Bengali, and the like to express verbs colloquially approximating the English verb “to know,” the term jñāna, as it is applied in classical Indian and Buddhist epistemology, has a much broader semantic scope, one that does not imply the possession of knowledge. Rather, the term jñāna designates any generic cognitive episode—one that could be correct (or accurate) or one that could be incorrect (or inaccurate). For example, when a person visually perceives a vase, she has a cognition (jñāna)
that apprehends a vase. So, too, were that person to have a hallucinatory experience as of a vase, she would be having a cognition that apprehends a vase. Note, in addition, the fact that while every cognition/jñāna is a cognition of something, its object or content may very well be nonpropositional. In the earlier example, the person has a cognition of a vase, not the cognition that there is a vase.
Without question, the Sanskrit term jñāna which I shall typically translate as “cognition” or “cognitive episode”—is one of the most important notions in all of Indian and Buddhist epistemology. As just stated, it plays a role roughly analogous to that occupied by belief in the contemporary analytic tradition of epistemology. Jñāna is not, however, the single most important concept in Indian epistemology. This is because jñāna has a semantic scope broader than that of “knowledge.” There is a specific subset of cognitive episodes that comprises all instances of knowledge, and those are the ones classified as pramā. The instruments responsible for generating these instances of knowledge are called pramāṇa, and it is this latter term that is, far and away, the most significant one in all of Indian (and Buddhist) epistemology.
1.3. Pramāna
1.3.1. The Origins of Pramāṇa Theory
The most fundamental concept in all of Indian epistemology, both for Buddhists and non-Buddhists, is the concept of pramāṇa. Epistemology as a field of philosophical study is, for Indian philosophers, primarily an investigation into and elucidation of the nature of pramāṇas. Stated most straightforwardly, a pramāṇa is a means or instrument by which a subject attains knowledge.12 More technically, a pramāṇa is held to be the instrument via which a cognitive agent achieves pramā where pramā is an episode of knowledge. Just as a person might eat food with a spoon, or clean one’s teeth with a toothbrush, or cut down a tree with an axe, so, too, whenever a person knows something, he or she does so through some instrument. A pramāṇa is the instrument used for attaining an instance of knowledge.
The claim that a pramāṇa is an instrument used for the attainment of knowledge is tied to the Indian tradition’s broad predilection for a causal theory of cognition (and knowledge). This causal account will be discussed
more fully in later chapters, but it is important to drive home the initial point that, in the Indian tradition of epistemology, knowledge is represented as a kind of event that occurs at a moment in time, and a pramāṇa is the dominant causal element that brings about, and culminates in, an episode of knowledge.
Linguistically, the term for an instance of knowledge, pramā, consists of the root mā, meaning “to measure,” and the prefix pra-, which expresses a kind of superiority or excellence. In this way, a pramā can be seen as a “measurement par excellence,” and thus a pramāṇa is the means or instrument for making such a measurement. Inasmuch as measurement is, loosely speaking, an activity of weighing or judging something, we can think of a pramā, more intuitively, as a kind of excellent (epistemic) judgment, and likewise understand a pramāṇa as a tool or instrument by which these excellent judgments are made.
As this book proceeds, only rarely will this idea of a pramāṇa as a tool for measurement be of critical concern. One such place, however, is in the discussion of skepticism found in chapter 7. There, the focus is on how one can establish pramāṇas as instruments for achieving knowledge. Skeptical criticisms are raised about the whole project of measurement. We can, for example, use a ruler so as to determine the length of a piece of wood. But how do we measure a ruler? What device can we use to determine how long a ruler is? This is a question of meta-measurement. The parallel question can be raised in terms of pramāṇas as instruments for knowledge. A pramāṇa can be used to “measure” some object or state of affairs. But how can we measure or establish a pramāṇa? Similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on the measurement of the standard meter in Paris, the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna presses the issue of how—or with what instrument—a pramāṇa can be established.13
There is yet another, and slightly different, way of construing what is meant by a pramāṇa. In its most literal sense it is an instrument by which one achieves pramā, or an episode of knowledge. But, by extension, we can think of pramāṇas as sources of knowledge. It is not very common within twentiethor twenty-first-century analytic epistemology to talk of “instruments of knowledge.” Yet the idea that there are a small number of fundamental sources of knowledge is widespread within the analytic tradition of philosophy. For example, the pioneering twentieth-century epistemologist Roderick Chisholm, in his important work, Theory of Knowledge, frames
many of his views around the assumption that there are various “sources” of knowledge. As he asserts:14
Thus, it is traditional in Western philosophy to say that there are four such sources:
1. “external perception”
2. memory
3. “self-awareness” (“reflection,” or “inner consciousness”)
4. reason
The exact breakdown that Chisholm provides is philosophically debatable, but he is no doubt right that this reference to various sources of knowledge is a familiar one within Western philosophy. The appeal to pramā ṇ as in traditional Indian philosophy plays a very similar role. Though, literally, a pramā ṇ a is an instrument for achieving knowledge, we can additionally think of these instruments as picking out individual sources of knowledge.
A large quantity of argumentation in Indian epistemological texts centers on disagreements about what these sources of knowledge are. Different philosophical schools uphold different sets of pramāṇas as legitimate. All Indian schools of thought accept perception (pratyakṣa) as a source of knowledge. And, except for the C ārvāka School of materialism, all Indian philosophical systems accept inferential reasoning (anumāna) as a source of knowledge as well. As will be described much more fully in chapter 2 and following, it is these two items, perception and inferential reasoning, that are accepted as the only legitimate sources of knowledge in the Buddhist tradition of epistemology that derives from Dignāga. Other traditions in India argue in support of additional sources, however. To give but one example, the Nyāya School accepts four sources of knowledge—the aforementioned perception and inference, together with analogy (upamāna) and testimony (śabda).
In summary, the concept of a pramāṇa, in the Indian tradition of philosophy, represents a source of knowledge or an instrument for attaining knowledge or an instrument by which one accurately measures reality. These three ways by which to speak of pramāṇas are essentially equivalent, but they differently emphasize the role or roles that pramāṇas play in the cognitive lives of human beings.
1.3.2. Buddhism and Pramāṇa
Buddhist epistemologists in India consent to this broad way of approaching the study of knowledge. Just like other Indian philosophers, they accept the idea that theoretical investigations of knowledge should be focused on exploring the concept of a pramāṇa. Yet in the tradition of Buddhist epistemology that derives from Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the exact role played by the term pramāṇa gets fundamentally changed. The traditional Indian account, described earlier, treats a pramāṇa as the instrument that brings about an episode of knowledge, where the episode of knowledge consists in a cognition that is the result (phala) of a causal process brought about by the pramāṇa. In the tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, however, it is argued that the pramāṇa is no different from the cognition that is its result (the pramāṇaphala). In other words, the cognition itself—an episode of knowledge—is considered a pramāṇa
This entails a conceptual shift in Buddhist epistemology where the central focus moves from the instruments of knowledge (pramāṇas qua instruments) to the cognitive episodes of knowledge themselves (pramāṇas qua cognitions). The traditional sense of pramāṇa as a means of knowledge is not lost and forgotten by Buddhist epistemologists, but the way in which they typically make sense of epistemological questions is changed. So, for example, instead of thinking of perception and inferential reasoning as two distinct sources of knowledge, Buddhists are more inclined to conceive of these pramāṇas as two different types of cognition—the two types of cognition that comprise episodes of knowledge.
When understood in this way, a pramāṇa is a specific subtype of cognition (jñāna). It is a subtype of cognition that meets the conditions necessary for knowledge. (Much more will be said about these conditions in the next chapter.) Buddhist epistemologists then contend that there are two subclasses within the class of pramāṇas: perceptual cognitions and inferential cognitions. In light of this Buddhist understanding of a pramāṇa as a subtype of cognition, the term pramāṇa has frequently been translated into English as “valid cognition.” This translation has the virtue of calling attention to the fact that pramāṇa are not instances of belief, but rather cognitions. However, the expression “valid cognition” is an artificial verbiage that was created by Indologists, and one that signifies little to those situated within the AngloAmerican tradition of philosophy. There is, after all, no clear meaning associated with calling a cognition “valid” within English language philosophy. It
can even incite confusion among Western trained philosophers, given how the term “valid” is commonly used in contexts of deductive logic.
My own preference is to translate pramāṇa within the Buddhist context—as “episode of knowledge,” or “knowledge episode,” or even simply as “knowledge.” In doing so, I am following the precedent set by the former University of Oxford philosopher B. K. Matilal, who utilized similar language in many of his writings on Indian epistemology.15 One must, of course, be very cautious in adopting such a translation. To speak of a pramāṇa as “an episode of knowledge,” much less as “knowledge,” is to call upon an English term—namely, “knowledge”—that carries a full set of connotations within contemporary analytic philosophy. I certainly do not mean to imply that the terms pramāṇa and knowledge are semantically equivalent. As readers will see in chapter 2, the standard Buddhist understanding of pramāṇa has a semantic scope and usage that is subtly but importantly different from that of how knowledge is paradigmatically treated in contemporary analytic epistemology.
Though much more will be said as this book proceeds about the central differences between the Buddhist’s “pramāṇa” and analytic epistemology’s “knowledge,” I will briefly call the reader’s attention to two significant dissimilarities, both of which will be addressed more fully in the pages that follow. First, in contemporary analytic epistemology, much of the focus is on identifying the conditions under which it can be said that ‘S knows that p,’ where p represents some proposition that is known. This promotes an interpretation wherein knowledge is viewed as a kind of two-place relation between a person/subject and a proposition—for example, K(S, p). Even in cases of perceptual knowledge, it has become common to describe such knowledge as involving a person perceptually knowing that p, for some proposition p. Discussions of nonpropositional knowledge in analytic epistemology have been shoved off into the far corners of the epistemological universe of discourse. In the Buddhist tradition of philosophy, by contrast, the most paradigmatic cases of knowledge are nonpropositional. What is known is an object, where this object could be a real, particular thing, or it could be an aggregate of an object and a quality/property. For example, on the Buddhist account, perception might give a person knowledge of the moon itself.16
A second key difference, even more important than that involving the object of knowledge, has to do with the underlying form of mentation that is operable in instances of knowledge. Nearly all analytic epistemologists
now assume that knowledge has belief as one of its necessary conditions. Standardly, however, beliefs are construed as dispositional states of an individual. A person can believe a proposition—for example, that 2 + 2 = 4— continuously from, let’s say, age four until age eighty-five. Even when a person is asleep, she can be regarded as holding the belief that 2 + 2 = 4. Matters are rather different in the Buddhist, and broader Indian, tradition of epistemology. As will be detailed more fully later, the cognitions that are at the heart of Buddhist epistemological theorizing are fleeting episodes. These cognitions arise through some causal process, occur at a single moment, and then pass out of existence. As such, what are at issue in the Buddhist (and broader Indian) tradition of epistemology are episodes of knowledge, not dispositional states of knowing.
Nevertheless, I believe there are benefits associated with referring to pramāṇas as “episodes of knowledge”—benefits that far outweigh any potential misunderstandings that could arise from how knowledge is standardly treated in contemporary analytic epistemology. In particular, it is important for readers to be consciously aware of the fact that the propositional and dispositional portrayal of knowledge in the analytic tradition is actually a highly idiosyncratic way of representing knowledge. Thus, to translate the term pramāṇa as “episode of knowledge” or even as “knowledge” serves to remind readers of just how idiosyncratic the contemporary analytic conception of knowledge has become, and to make it known that knowledge can extend beyond the standard propositional cases that have become the bread and butter of twentieth- and twenty-first-century epistemological theorizing.
Returning once again to the concept of pramāṇa, there is one final way that Buddhist epistemologists deploy the term that it is worth mentioning. In the salutation at the beginning of his key text, the Compendium of Knowledge, Dignāga refers to the Buddha as “one who has become a pramāṇa” (pramāṇabhūta). This reference will be addressed more fully in chapter 5 when discussing the idea of knowledge via testimony. What needs to be called attention to at present, however, is the simple idea that a person, or perhaps the words of a person, could be considered a pramāṇa. In other words, the term pramāṇa can be interpreted to mean something like “authority.” Calling the Buddha “one who has become a pramāṇa” can be likened to saying that the Buddha is someone whose proclamations are epistemically authoritative.17
