The Buddhist conception of the means of knowledge (pramāṇa) was revolutionarily systemized by Dignāga (c. 480–c. 540 CE) and Dharmakīrti (c. 600–c. 660 CE) in India. Some of Dignāga’s works have been transmitted into Chinese, but their ideas—especially Dharmakīrti’s—have not been fully articulated until modern times. The related Chinese works reflect different linguistic adaptations and sinification, while dealing mostly with hetuvidyā (Buddhist logico-epistemology or science of reasoning). Did the Chinese Buddhist monks fail to address the Indian Buddhist system adequately, or did they happen to reformulate a domesticated one? How did it happen? What nuances are left out or preserved in the Chinese sources, and what is the significance? This session investigates the transmission, translations, and key notions of Indian Buddhist pramāṇa in Chinese cultural and intellectual landscapes. It will explore the encounter and reflect on the challenges of this cross-cultural dialogue.
While not exactly “science” in the modern sense, the Buddhist “science of reasons” (yinming 因明) aims to provide universal criteria for assessing the validity of arguments and claims. Describing the development of this discipline in China in terms of “sinification” might, therefore, appear to be a generous euphemism for what some scholars have previously dismissed as a flawed transmission, or plain misunderstanding, of these intricate Indian theories. However, in my talk I would like to provide some arguments for reconsidering the fate of “science of reasons” in China, not as a failed attempt at reproducing the original Indian system, but rather as a case of its “domestication” within a new intellectual and cultural context. I will focus on Chinese interpretations of pramāṇas (“means” of valid cognition) in the late-Ming period, demonstrating how these Indian epistemological concepts became reconstructed and recontextualized within a distinctly Chinese intellectual framework.
This paper focuses on the notion of “mental consciousness simultaneous with five sensory consciousnesses” (henceforth abbreviated as MSF) preserved in the Chinese Yogācāra sources. I argue that this notion was crucial for better understanding Dignāga’s epistemology but it was totally forgotten by Dharmakīrti’s time.
I begin by arguing that Dignāga’s notion of mental perception (mānasa-pratyakṣa) can be made sense by taking MSF into consideration. I further suggest that MSF is closely related to the notion of mental construction by the nature [of the five sensory consciousness] (svabhāva-vikalpa) in the Abhidharma tradition. Finally, I show how MSF could help shed light on Dignāga’s notion of self-cognition (svasaṃvedana).
In conclusion, the importance of the Chinese sources is that they preserve the relevant context before and around the time of Vasubandhu, Dignāga and Dharmapāla. By carefully studying the Chinese pramāṇa sources, we see the continuity between Dignāga and his Abhidharma and Yogācāra predecessors.
This paper focuses on xianliang (現量), a Chinese translation and interpretation of an Indian Buddhist epistemic term, pratyakṣa (perception)—Dignāga described as non-conceptual while Dharmakīrti added a non-deceptive feature. Interestingly, influenced by Xuanzang’s (600/602–664) implementation of xianliang to translate both pratyakṣa and pratyakṣaṃ pramāṇam, pre-modern Chinese Buddhist interpreters, who lacked sufficient sources from Dignāga and without access to Dharmakīrti, developed theories about pratyakṣa that would not occur in the Sanskrit context. The seeming impact of “sinifying” pratyakṣa lingers even in the twentieth-century translations of Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s works derived from Tibetan sources. Drawing from the works of Lü Cheng (1896–1989) and Fazun (1902–1980) and examining them alongside the classical works, this paper suggests that the preservation of the non-literal translation, xianliang, is not merely a result of relying on the established terminology, but is essentially a linguistic adaptation and notably a hermeneutic extension of the philosophical meaning.