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Notes
No doubt Far Eastern Buddhist schools, like the Faxiang (“characters of the elements,” *dharmalakṣaṇa) school of Xuanzang and Kuiji in the Tang Dynasty, did have a considerable theoretical literature on the canons of argumentation. The distinct contributions and character of this Chinese yinmingxue (“study of reasoning”) are, alas, out of the scope of this volume.
What about magic and the use of miracles? How much of a place did they have? The tactic of settling philosophical issues by overpowering the opponent supernaturally was—as Cabezón shows in examining the accounts of famous Buddhist debates and debaters (e.g., Dignāga, Aśvaghoṣa, Āryadeva and others)—not prized by Buddhists to anything like the degree it seems to have been by non-Buddhists. See Cabezón, this volume, no. 26: “Magic is at most a means to confirm a victory gotten by verbal or rational means. In the Buddhist texts being examined here, using magic as a means to victory is tantamount to cheating, or else, as in the case of Dignāga, the way in which defeated non-Buddhists exact revenge on their Buddhist opponents.”
Note that the defense of debate in the early text, the Fang Bian Xin Lun (translated in this volume by Brendan Gillon), does seem to go in this direction—debate is useful to spread the doctrine and defend it from confused and malicious adversaries. Other, generally later texts, see a kind of internalized argumentation as also having value for oneself, or as even being indispensable for one’s own spiritual progress.
The issue comes up as the subject of a very important debate in the early history of Tibetan Buddhism, i.e., the famous 8th century debate pitting the quietist Chinese monk, Hvashang, (and some Tibetan followers) against the camp of the “mainstream” Indian paṇḍit, Kamalaśīla. See Demiéville (1987) and Seyfort Ruegg (1989).
For the Vādavidhi, see Frauwallner (1982). See also the Nyāyapraveśa, translated and explained in Tachikawa (1971), a text which is quite close in spirit to Dignāga's vāda work, the Nyāyamukha. See also the article by Brendan Gillon in his volume for an example of an even earlier Buddhist vāda text.
Actually, Buddhists seem to have differed significantly on whether satisfaction of the triple criterion guaranteed the truth of the proposition to be proved, i.e., that the proposition must be true if the reason satisfies the requisite triple criterion. Up until and including Dignāga, it seems that Buddhists acknowledged that there could be certain types of good reasons, e.g., the so-called “antinomic reasons” (viruddhāvyabhicārin), that nonetheless lacked this feature of guaranteed truth conservation and proved two opposing conclusions. With Dharmakīrti, however, this scenario of reasons satisfying the triple characteristic for two opposing conclusions is thought to be impossible. See Tillemans (2000, pp. 92–95), concerning “antinomic reasons”. See also Oetke (1996) on the question of whether Indian logic is monotonic or non-monotonic (i.e., promoting guaranteed truth conservation or not).
The reasoning in question is the notorious asādhāraṇānaikāntikahetu (reason which is uncertain because of being too exclusive), which occurs when the subject A is coextensive with the reason C. Taking the epistemic interpretation of the problem, it is said to be impossible to know that all C’s are B, because there is no example, D, of a C and B which is not A. The factual interpretation is to say that C’s are not present in the similar instances because such instances should be similar to A in possessing B, but should not actually themselves be A’s. See Kajiyama (1958), Tillemans (1999, Ch. 5).
The above form of the inference-for-others is certainly not the only form that Indian thinkers advocated: pre-Dharmakīrti Buddhists did advocate a three-membered form including a statement of the conclusion; non-Buddhist Naiyāyikas advocated a five-membered form; there were even some thinkers who prescribed a formal reasoning with ten members including statements of what is in doubt, the goal of the argument, the possibility of a solution, etc.! What we find is that a considerable amount of sophisticated philosophy of logic and argumentation is done over precisely those issues of what should and should not figure in a formal reasoning, as generally the answers to those types of questions will, for Indian thinkers, be based on a larger conception of what logic is and how reasoning functions. See Tillemans (1999, Ch. 4).
The bibliography is also valuable in this regard. A sample of some other reference works: E. Frauwallner's various articles on Indian logic in his Kleine Schriften; Hattori (1968), Oberhammer (1991), Kajiyama (1989), Matilal (1971, 1998) as well as the introduction to Matilal and Evans (1986), Mimaki (1976), Dreyfus (1997). There are also articles (and short bibliographies) on Indian logic, philosophy of language and epistemology in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig, London, 1998. See also the issue on Buddhist logic in G. Paul (editor), Hōrin. Vergleichende Studien zur Japanischen Kultur 11, Düsseldorf, 2005.
This is certainly right: a typical investigation for Buddhist thinkers is to enquire how it is that one fact “establishes” another, or to use the Sanskrit terms, how such and such a thing is a sign (liṅga, evidence) for another. Cf. Dharmakīrti’s rejection of the linguistic perspective in favour of the ontic in Pramāṇavārttika IV, k. 15 (Tillemans 2000, pp. 26–27): “One understands one state of affairs from another. Thus the statements of the thesis and reason have no power with regard to the state of affairs [in question, i.e., that which is being proved]. Hence, these two [statements] do not, in themselves, constitute means of proof (sādhana).” (arthād arthagateḥ śaktiḥ pakṣahetvabhidhānayoḥ/nārthe tena tayor nāsti svataḥ sādhanasaṃsthitiḥ //)
Faced with a challenge by certain Buddhists, who hold that all relations between words and objects are man-made, the Mīmāṃsaka argues that language learning presupposes that not every word–object relation is arbitrary, and that there must always be some language where the word–object relation is fixed—failing that the Buddhist challenge itself would end up meaningless.
For a bibliography of translations, editions and studies of the Indian Buddhist literature on debate and epistemology, see Steinkellner and Much (1995).
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Tillemans, T.J.F. Introduction: Buddhist Argumentation. Argumentation 22, 1–14 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9072-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9072-9