Дхармакирти: 7-ғасыр буддалық философ және эпистемолог

Buddhist philosopher
the 10th century teacher from Suvarṇadvīpa

Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 6th or 7th century; Tibetan: ཆོས་ཀྱི་གྲགས་པ་; Wylie: chos kyi grags pa), was an influential Indian Buddhist philosopher who worked at Nālandā. He was one of the key scholars of epistemology (pramāṇa) in Buddhist philosophy, and is associated with the Yogācāra and Sautrāntika schools. He was also one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism. As a student of Buddhism, he first studied under Isvarasena, and later moved to Nalanda where he interacted with 6th century Dharmapala. However, the accuracy of the Tibetan hagiographies is uncertain, and scholars place him in the 7th century instead. This is because of inconsistencies in different Tibetan and Chinese texts, and because it is around the middle of 7th century, and thereafter, that Indian texts begin discussing his ideas, such as the citation of Dharmakirti verses in the works of Adi Shankara. Dharmakīrti is placed by most scholars to have lived between 600 and 660 CE, but a few place him earlier. Dharmakirti is credited with building upon the work of Dignāga, the pioneer of Buddhist logic, and Dharmakirti has ever since been seen as influential in the Buddhist tradition. but history proved his fears wrong. Tillemans sees him as holding to a weak form of correspondence theory, which holds that to "confirm causal efficacy" (arthakriyāsthiti) is to have a justification that an object of cognition has the causal powers we expected. Dharmakirti held the mindstream to be a beginning less yet also described the mindstream as a temporal sequence, and that as there are no true beginnings, there are no true endings, hence, the "beginningless time" motif that is frequently used to describe the concept of mindstream.

There is disagreement among Indian and Tibetan doxographers as to how to categorise Dharmakīrti's thoughts. The Gelug school asserts that he expressed Yogācāra views, most non Gelug Tibetan commentators assert that he expressed Sautrāntika views and, according to one Tibetan source, several of renowned later Indian Madhyamikas asserted that he expressed Madhyamaka views. Among modern scholars, some like Tillemans argue that Dharmakīrti represented the Yogācāra school, while Amar Singh argues that he was a Sautrāntika. For Christine Mullikin Keyt, Dharmakīrti represents a "synthesis of two schools of Indian Buddhism, the Sautrantika and the Yogacara." Likewise, Dan Arnold argues that Dharmakīrti's alternating philosophical perspectives of Sautrāntika and Yogācāra views are ultimately compatible and are applied at different levels of his 'sliding scale of analysis.' There is also a tendency to see Dignāga and Dharmakīrti as founding a new type of Buddhist school or tradition, which is known in Tibetan as "those who follow reasoning" (rigs pa rjes su 'brang ba) and sometimes is known in modern literature as pramāṇavāda.