Dignāga

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dignāga (5th century AD), was an Indian scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian philosophical logic.

He was born into a Brahmin family in Simhavakta near Kanchi (Kanchipuram), and very little is known of his early years, except that he took as his spiritual preceptor Nagadatta of the Vatsiputriya school. This branch of Buddhist thought defended the view that there exists a kind of real personality independent of the elements or aggregates composing it.

Among Dignaga's works there is Hetucakra (The wheel of reason), considered his first work on formal logic, advancing a new form of deductive reasoning. It may be regarded as a bridge between the older doctrine of trairūpya and Dignaga's own later theory of vyāpti which is a concept related to the Western notion of implication.

Other works include The Treatise on the Objects of Cognition (Ālambana-parīkṣā), The Treatise on Systems of Cognition (Pramāṇa-samuccaya), and The Treatise on the Correct Principles of Logic (*Nyāya-mukha), produced in an effort to establish what were the valid sources of knowledge (see Epistemology).

[edit] External references

• Article on Theosophy Library Online
• Dignaga's Logic of Invention, by Volker Peckhaus
• Das Rad der Gründe, German translation of The Wheel of Reason