- Lived:
- two lives, one system, a century apart. Dignāga: c. 480–540 CE, born by tradition into a brahmin family near Kāñci (Kanchipuram), famous at Nālandā in the Ganges country, died — the Tibetan histories say — in a forest cave in Odisha. Dharmakīrti: born in south India; his dates are among the most disputed in Indian philosophy — c. 600–660 (Frauwallner), the mid-500s (Krasser), c. 550–610 (Balcerowicz) — and his working life belongs to Nālandā.
- Field:
- logic and epistemology — pramāṇa theory, the science of what counts as knowledge; the rationalist wing of Buddhist philosophy
- The Big Idea:
- Knowledge has exactly two honest sources — bare perception and disciplined inference. Everything else, scripture and authority included, must pass their test or be demoted to hearsay.
- In their words:
- "Finding no one in this world to grasp its depths, my words will grow old in my own body — as rivers grow old in the sea." (the verse of despair transmitted with Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika; free rendering — translators differ on the wording, not the gloom)
- If you remember one thing:
- A monk from near Kāñci cut all knowing down to two sources and built the first table for testing whether a reason proves anything; a century later a southerner rebuilt his system so formidably that every school in India spent five centuries answering it — and he died convinced nobody had understood a word. Tibetan monks are debating his book in a courtyard this evening.