Dignaga and the Evolution of the Particular in the Buddhist Epistemological Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
he purpose of this paper is two-fold.First, it attempts to provide a clear and accurate interpretation of the views of Dignaga (ca.480-540 C.E.) on perception (pratyaksa) and its object, the extreme particu lar (svalaksana).This can be accomplished only if one recognizes that much of what Dignaga has to say in this area responds to a fundamen tal tension implicit in the two-pramdna epistemological framework he wished to establish.Whether Dignaga successfully resolves this tension may be debatable; all I wish to show here is that he was aware of it and that a plausible response within the terms of this framework was open to him-even though it may have been left to his successors to actually connect the dots.The second objective is to show how this same tension carries over into post-Dignagian elaborations of the two-pramana system of the Buddhist epistemological school.In this light I will adumbrate a cer tain trend in the historical development of the notions of pratyaksa and svalaksana with reference to the views of Dharmaklrti (ca.600-660 C.E.) and Moksakaragupta (ca.1050-1292 C.E.).This choice of fig ures is meant to be illustrative of the historical trend I wish to explore; it is not, of course, exhaustive.What then, is this tension?Fundamental to the Buddhist episte mological project was a broad distinction made between the only two accepted kinds of valid cognition (pramdna): pratyaksa (perception) and ARC, The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill, 29, 2001, 5-21
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".