- Lived:
- c. 600–660 CE (dates contested) · South India, then Nālandā, the great Buddhist university in the north
- Tradition:
- Indian Buddhist; the summit of the Buddhist school of logic and epistemology founded by Dignāga
- The Big Idea:
- Something is real only if it can do something — and everything we rightly believe rests on just two supports: what we perceive and what we can validly infer from it.
- In their words:
- "My work will find no one in this world who could easily grasp its depths. Like a river merging into the ocean, it will grow old and die within my own body."
- If you remember one thing:
- He rebuilt Buddhist logic so thoroughly that for the next thousand years, every philosopher in India — Buddhist or not, friend or enemy — had to argue on his terms.