Abstract

Fifth and sixth century India saw the flowering of Buddhist and non-Buddhist thought. Two figures ushered in this prolific age, the anti-Buddhist grammarian, Bhartrhari and the Buddhist logician, Dignaga. Dignaga's writing for the most part have been lost, or have survived only in fragmentary form. The memory of his ideas has flickered through the centuries largely in the writing of his dazzling commentator, Dharmakirti. Tradition has it that Dignaga's works were allowed to disappear because what was valuable in them had been preserved and illuminated through Dharmakirti's work. My thesis is an attempt to reassess this judgement of history. ;Instead of reading Dignaga through Dharmakirti's eyes, as has customarily been done, I have stepped back and focused on the earlier work of Bhartrhari. I have sketeched a portrait of Bhartrhari on the basis of his Jatisamuddesa. I have drawn out the implications of Bhartrhari's thought, especially his case against the Buddhist ideal of a non-conceptual monistic reality. These features of Bhartrhari's thought bring into focus the philosophical intentions behind Dignaga's otherwise obscure theories of language and his logic. ;Chapter I is concerned with the historical and philosophical background of Dignaga's text. ;Chapter II develops relevant aspects of Bhartrhari's thought, his view of the analytic content of names and his view of the relation between names, universals and individuals. ;Chapter III deals with Dignaga's apoha doctrine. The doctrine is viewed as a method of evading the consequences flowing from Bhartrhari's conclusions. ;Chapter IV describes Dignaga's goal of a phenomenalistic reconstruction of worldly affairs, and the manner in which his logic supported this reconstruction. I try to show that the problems which confront Dignaga's particular brand of phenomenalism developed out of opposition to Bhartrhari's system. ;Chapter V examines Dharmakirti's debt to Bhartrhari and measures the distance between Dignaga's and Dharmakirti's thought. ;In attempting to carve out an independent place for Dignaga's thought my strategy has been to define Bhartrhari's philosophical achievements and to present Dignaga's logical doctrines as developing in opposition to them