The concept of “self-awareness” ( svasaṃvedana ) enters Buddhist epistemological discourse in the Pramāṇasamuccaya and - vṛtti by Dignāga (ca. 480–540), the founder of the Buddhist logico-epistemological tradition. Though some of the key passages have already been dealt with in various publications, no attempt has been made to comprehensively examine all of them as a whole. A close reading is here proposed to make up for this deficit. In connection with a particularly difficult passage (PS(V) 1.8cd-10) that presents the means (...) of valid cognition and its result ( pramāṇa/pramāṇaphala ), a new interpretation is suggested, inspired by the commentary of Jinendrabuddhi. This interpretation highlights an aspect of selfawareness that has hitherto not been claimed for Dignāga: self-awareness offers essentially subjective access to one’s own mental states and factors. (shrink)

The Buddhist epistemologist Dharmakīrti (fl. ca. 7th century C.E.) developed a theory of yogic perception that achieved much influence among Buddhist thinkers in India and Tibet. His theory includes an odd problem: on Dharmakīrti’s view, many of the paradigmatic objects of the adept’s meditations do not really exist. How can one cultivate a meditative perception of the nonexistent? This ontological difficulty stems from Dharmakīrti’s decision to construe the Four Noble Truths as the paradigmatic objects of yogic perception. For him, this (...) ontological problem manifests in an epistemological corollary: “impermanence” (anityatā) and other features of the Noble Truths are conceptual, but the adept’s meditative perception of them must be nonconceptual. How can a nonconceptual cognition apprehend a conceptual object? A key aspect of Dharmakīrti’s theory of concepts provides a solution to this problem. Specifically, Dharmakīrti maintains that a concept, when taken as a mental event, can be considered a particular and thus an object of nonconceptual cognition. Taking this approach, Dharmakīrti downplays the notion that yogic perception is an encounter with real things in the world, in part because it is phenomenally akin to hallucination. Instead, what counts for Dharmakīrti—and what differentiates the adept’s realization from the madman’s hallucination—are the salvific effects induced by the meditative experience. (shrink)

Framed as a consideration of the other contributions to the present volume of the Journal of Indian Philosophy, this essay attempts to scout and characterize several of the interrelated doctrines and issues that come into play in thinking philosophically about the doctrine of svasaṃvitti, particularly as that was elaborated by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Among the issues thus considered are the question of how mānasapratyakṣa (which is akin to manovijñāna) might relate to svasaṃvitti; how those related doctrines might be brought to (...) bear with respect to some problems addressed with reference to the further doctrine (also closely related to svasaṃvitti) concerning pramāṇaphala; and the distinctiveness of Dharmakīrti’s sahopalambhaniyama argument for svasaṃvitti. A question recurrently considered throughout the essay has to do with whether (following Akeel Bilgrami) svasaṃvitti reflects a perceptual or a constitutive understanding of self-awareness. (shrink)