Buddhist Epistemological School (Dharmakīrti): the self does not exist. The only thing that exists is a stream (santāna) of causally linked momentary cognitions. Cognitions are self-aware of themselves qua cognitions (svasaṃvedana). This is not contradictory, because each cognition has a perceiver and a perceived aspect (grāhaka and grāhya-ākāra respectively).
Nyāya: the self is known only through inference (Vātsyāyana, Jayanta); it is known also through perception (Uddyotakara, Udayana)*
Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā (Kumārila): we have direct access to our self through ahampratyaya `cognition of the I’. No need to infer it, since perception trumps inference and Mīmāṃsā authors require novelty as a criterion for knowledge, so that repeating what is already known through ahampratyaya would not count as knowledge.

The first Nyāya position might lead to problems if connected with the acceptance of yogic perception. Yogins can indeed perceive the self, according to all Naiyāyikas. Why not all other beings, given that perception requires a conjunction of self+manas+sense faculties, that the self is pervasive (vibhu) and that spatial limits are not needed for perception, as shown by the case of absence? Jayanta explains that the self is partless and that a partless thing cannot simultaneously be perceiver and perceived (cf. Kumārila’s argument against the Buddhist idea of cognitions’ having a perceiver and a perceived aspect and Kumārila’s claiming that this does not apply to the self, which is complex and not partless).

The Mīmāṃsā position requires the joint work of intrinsic validity and falsification: some I-cognitions are not about the ātman, since they are indeed falsified (e.g., “I am thin”, which only refers to the body).
Other I-cognitions are not, e.g., cognising ourselves qua knowers and recognising ourselves as the same knower who knew something in the past.

*I am grateful to Alex Watson for discussing the topic with me per email, on top of his decades of work on the topic!

There is a time within Sanskrit philosophy, approximately around 500 to 1000 CE, without which all later discussions do not make sense (whereas one can understand later discussions without referring to, e.g., the Brāhmaṇas, the Pāli canon etc.).
I am thinking of this core of Sanskrit philosophy as the period of time in which philosophers interacted with each other in a dialectical way, learning from each other and being compelled by each other’s points. In other words, as the time in which philosophy was constrained by the need to give reasons for each claim. In this sense, I am not focusing on the Pāli Canon or on the Upaniṣads.

At the core of this period lies the interaction between three schools, namely Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Buddhist epistemological school. No matter the topic, the interaction among these three is always at the center and always needs to be taken into account. According to the various topics, further schools might need to be taken into account. For instance, discussions about atomism will need to take into account the Vaiśeṣika school, discussions about language need to take into account the Vyākaraṇa school.

At the center of this core moment are discussions about epistemology and philosophy of language. It is interesting to note that ontology does not necessarily logically precede epistemology and that the opposite can be the case, especially in the case of Mīmāṃsā. This is particularly evident in the case of discussions about prāmāṇya `validity’.

Sanskrit philosophy developed through debates among thinkers commenting and responding to each other. In this way, they showed that ‘novelty’ is overestimated as a criterion to assess philosophical value and its consistent presence among the criteria reviewers of grants and projects are asked to assess is more the result of a fashion than of inner-philosophical reasons.

This does not mean that individual authors did not deliver substantial contribution to philosophy. Philosophy develops through its history and its history is made by individual thinkers. Nonetheless, these individual thinkers contribute under the garb of a school, downplaying their disagreements with their predecessors and often enveloping them within a commentary on a predecessor’s text, which is meant not just to explain it, but also to enfold all its potential meaning. Some scholars did move from one school to the other (e.g., possibly Vasubandhu or Maṇḍana), others just introduced in one school the elements of the other school they more strongly agreed with (e.g., Jayanta).

Key authors to be kept in mind:
• Dignāga (Buddhist epistemological school), introduced the threefold check, later accepted by all thinkers
• Kumārila (Mīmāṃsā), introduced the concept of intrinsic validity, explained that cognitions are not self-aware, challenged the Dignāga framework, systematised the discussions about absence and the other sources of knowledge (found already in his predecessor, Śabara).
• Dharmakīrti (Buddhist epistemological school), younger contemporary of Kumārila, adjusted the apoha theory and several other epistemological points in the light of Kumārila’s cricitism.
• Jayanta (Nyāya), modified the Nyāya epistemology in the light of Kumārila’s criticism, explained that cognitions are intrinsically doubtful, unless proven right, but that this does not lead to a paralysis, because one can act based on doubt.

Author: A philosopher of two worlds, pupil of amazing scholars of Nyāya and of Analytic philosophy, completely accomplished in both worlds in a way which is hard to repeat

—Book: It puts together Arindam’s research of 27 years. Thus, it is a collection of articles, but very well edited together, possibly because they deal with a topic very much at the heart of Arindam’s global philosophical enterprise, one that I am going to discuss below.

—Target reader: A Mark Siderits, i.e., someone who is completely committed to the project of “fusion philosophy” (more on that below), who is able to roam around Sanskrit texts and is committed to Anglo-Analytic philosophy AND to its confidence in neurosciences. Thus, this target reader, unlike in Sanskrit philosophy, demolishes the idea of a stable unified subject, but believes in the world of atoms and mind-independent objects of hard sciences. This point is crucial to explain why Arindam often explains how denying the subject *will* lead to denial of the object as well, rather than explaining that denying the object will lead to denying the subject (as it would happen in Sanskrit philosophy and European one).

—Topic: Arindam is an outspoken realist. He grounds his realism in the self-evident reality of hard sciences, based on which we cannot be illusionists nor idealists. However, he also claims that one cannot be a realist about objects without being also a realist about subjects AND even about universals and relations (!). So, basically if you want to be a good scientist, you are committed to defend also a robust understanding of the subject and you can’t avoid defending also universals and relations, such as inherence. Once you open the door a little bit and allow for the idealism / not realism about universals, you WILL UNAVOIDABLY end up undermining the whole realist enterprise.

—Methodology: I spoke already about “fusion philosophy”. This is not comparative philosophy, insofar as what Arindam does is not a descriptive comparison nor a detached description of two or more comparable points of view. Rather, he has a problem he cares about (realism) and uses the best possible arguments to drive his point home. And he finds the best arguments in Nyāya and in contemporary anglo-analytic philosophy, with some addition of neuro-sciences, but also of other philosophical traditions. They are anyway all subservient to finding the truth. There is no interest in being complete or exhaustive, nor in exploring different points of view as a good thing in itself. This also explains why Arindam does surprisingly little to justify his methodology and espouses some possibly naïve terminological choices, such as speaking of “Indian vs Western philosophy”. 

—”Object”: not just atoms, but also mid-sized objects, like the ones we encounter every day, chairs etc. Here the key is its persistence through time (via re-identificability at different moments of time) of the object, which is invariably linked to the persistence through time of the subject.

—”Subject”: Which subject is Arindam defending? One that is the complex knower of Sanskrit philosophy, i.e., the unified knower who is able to perceive with different sense faculties and remember and is then able to desire and act based on what they cognised. Against Hume and the Buddhist and neuro-scientific idea that it is enough to have unrelated sensations + a superimposed sense of their unity.

—”Universals”: You cannot be a realist, says Arindam, unless you are also a realist about universals. You need universals to recognise things as tokens of a certain type. And, since Arindam is the intelligent crazy person he is, he adds a great example: A piece of music exists independently of its specific realisation. Similarly, a universal exists independently of its specific instantiations. Now, you might say that it’s hard to be a realist about universals, since these are products of our mind. No, replies Arindam basing himself on P.K. Sen. If you think that you can’t perceive universals, it means that you have a wrong theory of perception. He therefore welcomes conceptual perception and expert perception as evidences for the perceptibility of universals.

—”Properties”: This includes also universals and what Sanskrit philosophers call upādhis ‘pseudo-universals’, such as generalisations

—Indefinability of truth: Arindam defends the Nyāya precept according to which it is possible to uphold simultaneously these two things:

A. Everything that exists is *in principle* knowable

B. Not everything that is knowable is known at any point of time

Why is this important? Because if existence and knowability are invariably connected, then Dharmakīrti’s argument about the sahopalambhaniyama is doomed to failure.

—Śālikanātha (around the 9th c.), a thinker of the Prābhākara subschool of Mīmāṃsā, has been incredibly influential for almost all Sanskrit philosophy

—a typical methodology of Sanskrit philosophers for finding the truth is examining definitions and refining them by eliminating what is wrong or superfluous and trying to find the perfect definition (see here for Śālikanātha’s refutation of the Buddhist definitions)

—concerning the issue of knowledge, Śālikanātha’s perfect definition of it sounds pretty minimalist: knowledge is experience. This is enough, he thinks, because it excludes memory (which is not experience) and because there is no need to exclude doubt or error. In fact, doubt is not a single cognition but a sum of two correct cognitions. Erroneous cognitions, in turn, do not exist as such, but are only incomplete cognitions. For instance, we might believe that something shiny we see on the beach is silver, whereas it is in fact mother-of-pearl. This is not a real mistake, since the “this” part of the cognition “This is silver” is correct. The “silver” part is just a memory, since it corresponds to the silver we have seen elsewhere and we have been reminded of because of the equally shiny mother-of-pearl. Thus, experience are always correct and “knowledge is experience” is a sufficient definition of knowledge.

What we are going to see today:
Śālikanātha’s definition of sense-perception

Why should we care?
1. Because Śālikanātha is a great thinker, who influenced almost all later Sanskrit philosophers.
2. Because Śālikanātha is an elegant writer, a pleasure to read.
3. Because Śālikanātha has interesting arguments to offer on the topic at stake.

On 3: One might think that the definition of “sense-perception” is easy and that there is no need to discuss it at length. We would probably all agree that it depends on sense-faculties and much of the disagreement has already been dealt with under the heading of the definition of knowledge (such as the issue of infallibilism).
However, this is not the case. First of all, Śālikanātha needs to discuss the (wrong, in his opinion) definitions coming from Dharmakīrti’s school, Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā itself. Much of these definitions is wrong because of reasons already discussed in connection with the definition of pramāṇa.

Accordingly, his definition of sense-perception will be minimalist: A direct experience (sākṣātpratīti) generated from the connection of the sense-faculties with the knowable items, i.e., substances, universals and qualities, with or without concepts:

sākṣātpratītiḥ pratyakṣaṃ meyamātṛpramāsu sā |

meyeṣv indriyayogotthā dravyajātiguṇeṣu sā ||

savikalpāvikalpā ca pratyakṣā buddhir iṣyate |

(Amṛtakālā v. 4–5ab)

Since the definition needs to contain nothing redundant, let us analyse each element of it:

• sākṣātpratītiḥ (“it is a direct cognition”): to exclude inference etc. (agreed upon by all schools)
• meyamātṛpramāsu sā (“it is about object, knower and knowledge”): sense-perception can grasp, besides substances, also qualities and even universals (agreed upon by Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, against Dharmakīrti’s school). Śālikanātha specifies on p. 142 of the pramāṇapārāyaṇa that if one were not to accept that, there would not be anything left to cognise via sense-perception, since one never grasps substances on their own.
• meyeṣu indriyayogotthā (“it is generated by a contact of the sense-faculties with the objects”): against the idea of intellectual intuition (agreed upon by Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, against Dharmakīrti’s school and Nyāya)
• dravyajātiguṇeṣu sā (“it is about substances, universals or qualities”): sense-perception can grasp, besides substances, also qualities and even universals (agreed upon by Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, against Dharmakīrti’s school). Śālikanātha specifies on p. 142 of the pramāṇapārāyaṇa that if one were not to accept that, there would not be anything left to cognise via sense-perception, since one never grasps substances on their own.
• savikalpāvikalpā (“it is conceptual or non-conceptual”): it can be conceptual and non-conceptual (agreed upon by Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, against Dharmakīrti’s school)

Next, Śālikanātha has to define what counts as perception. Possible candidates are (according to Dharmakīrti’s school):
1. sense-perception
2. mental perception (mānasapratyakṣa)
3. self-awareness (svasaṃvedana)
4. intellectual intuition (yogipratyakṣa)

1. is clearly accepted.

2. is, surprisingly and against Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, accepted (see the discussion about meyamātṛpramāsu sā above). All cognitions are therefore immediately accessible to self-awareness.

3. is refuted. This might be slightly complicated, since manas is not defined as in Nyāya and Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, namely as the inner sense faculty, which can grasp pleasure and pain. Śālikanātha succintly defines mānasapratyakṣa as “produced by the cognition through the sense-faculties together with the instant immediately following the one the instant (kṣaṇa) which has been previously cognised (by the sense faculties)”. The commentator, Jayapuri Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, explains that it is therefore produced by the object and the cognition together. The terminology and the topic itself make Śālikanātha steer here in the direction of discussing Dharmakīrti’s school. He then later (p 142 of the pramāṇapārāyaṇa) refutes it, explaining that it is nothing different than continuous perceptions (dhārāvāhikajñāna), like the ones we have while staring for a long time the same object. By contrast, the so-called mental perception that continues also once the contact with the sense faculties has ceased, is just no longer a case of knowledge, Śālikanātha explains.
4 is refuted. Why? Because what we think to be grasping directly but without the senses (e.g., the four noble truths during deep meditation) is nothing but our memory presenting us with some content we were already acquainted with. There is nothing new that derives from meditation itself. Claiming the opposite is something you can do for religious reasons, not on epistemological bases.

What I would like you to remember of this series?
—Go check Śālikanātha’s extensive Prakaraṇapañcikā if you want to make a stroll in philosophical landscapes, almost all topics are covered, and always with interesting ideas.
—”Knowledge is experience”: there is no error.
—Intellectual intuition is nothing but memory.

First of all, he discusses the criterion of avisaṃvāditva ‘non deviation’ (used by Dharmakīrti and his school) and shows how this is not enough to exclude memory (smṛti). Dharmakīrti could exclude memory because it is conceptual, but this would exclude also inference (anumāna).

Next suggestion (again from Dharmakīrti’s school): using causal efficacy (arthakriyā) as criterion. But in this way memory should again be considered a source of knowledge, since it can be causally efficacious. One could say that, unlike in memory, in the case of inference there is a connection (though indirect) with the object. But this, again, applies to memory as well!

A new attempt is to say that a source of knowledge is identified insofar as it leads to know something unknown (aprāptaprāpaka), which is a criterion typical of Kumārila. A variant thereof is to say that it causes to act people who were previously inactive (pravartakatva), but this would lead to the fact that non-conceptual cognitions (nirvikalpa) would not be sources of knowledge, given that they cannot promote any action.

Why not using aprāptaprāpaka as criterion? Because this would not apply to the case of continuous cognitions (dhārāvāhikajñāna). These are cognitions like the ones originated out of continuously looking at the same object. These count, according to Śālikanātha, as sources of knowledge, but would not be such if the criterion of aprāptaprāmāṇaka were to be the defining one.

What about dṛḍha ‘sure’ as criterion, then?
Here Śālikanātha can give voice to the Prābhākara theory of knowledge. First of all, he asks, what would dṛḍha exclude? If it excludes doubt, then this is wrong, since there is no doubtful cognition. What we call ‘doubt’ is instead the sum of two distinct cognitions (readers might want to recall the fact that for the Nyāya school, doubt is a cognition in which two alternatives are exactly equally probably).
As for erroneous cognitions (bhrānti), these also don’t need to be excluded from the definition of knowledge, because there are no erroneous cognitions. What looks like an erroneous cognitions, is at most an incomplete one. For instance, mistaking mother-of-pearl for silver means rightly recognising a shining thing on the beach + remembering silver. The latter part is not knowledge, but just because it is memory. Śālikanātha similarly treats the case of jaundice and other perceptual errors.

His conclusion is a minimal definition of knowledge: pramāṇam anubhūtiḥ “knowledge is experience”.

(cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy blog, where you can also read some interesting comments)

The first ones are various Buddhist positions. Dharmakīrti’s definition connects the criterion of avisaṃvāditva literally ‘being non-controversial’ but more likely ‘being non-erroneous’ to that of arthakriyā ‘causal efficacy’. Śālikanātha refutes it on the ground of the fact that this does not exclude smṛti ‘memory’, which can also be avisaṃvādin. At this point, various Buddhist voices try to fix this possible flaw in the definition. It is not clear to me how many of them are historically attested and how many are concocted by Śālikanātha as logically possible responses. Some of them claim that smṛti is excluded because it is conceptual (vikalpa), but this is a dangerous move, since Śālikanātha can immediately reply that, based on that, also inference should be refuted, since also inference is conceptual.

A further possibility is to say that smṛti is not pramāṇa because it lacks arthakriyā. But is this really the case? One might say that the object of smṛti is always something past and that it therefore cannot lead you to attain any present object. However, this is also true, in some sense, for anumāna (remember that in the case of anumāna you usually infer the cause from its effect and that inferring the effect from the cause is not a valid anumāna). One might correct the previous point by suggesting that in anumāna the inferential reason is connected to the probandum, which can therefore be said to be attained. However, this, again, holds true also for smṛti, since also in the case of smṛti there is a connection with the object, via mnestic traces (saṃskāra). Why should this be so different from the case of anumāna?

The sequence of voices makes it difficult for one to identify the main speaker and the various uttarapakṣin, but the main thread remains clear, namely:

• Dharmakīrti’s definition is too broad, since it does not exclude smṛti
• Other Buddhist attempts to exclude smṛti are futile, since they would end up excluding also anumāna

So, how can smṛti be excluded? Only through the Mīmāṃsā definition of pramāṇa, namely aprāptaprāpaka ‘causing one to understand something which was not known before’.

(cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy Blog, where you can read also some interesting comments)

Range of application of the “omni” in omniscience
Jaina authors tend to construe omniscience in the above way, namely as the knowledge of all possible states of affairs, attribute it to the Jinas and stress the innate potentiality of omniscience as being open to everybody (apart from God, given that they don’t believe in an absolute ultimate God).

Different Buddhist authors held widely different opinions about this topic. The Theravāda commentator Buddhaghosa (who lived in Śrī Laṅka in the 5th c. and wrote or systematised commentaries on the Buddhist Pāli canon) describes the Buddha’s omniscience not as the simultaneous knowledge of all things at the same time, but as his possibility to know without any obstacle whatever he fixed his attention on. In other words, the Buddha would know everything about person X as soon as he tried, but he would not know at the same time anything about all possible people and states of affairs. Buddhaghosa could in this way avoid paradoxes such as way would an omniscient Buddha try to beg for food at houses where no one is home (as it happens in some Suttas of the Canon).

Later Buddhist authors such as Dharmakīrti would suggest that the Buddha does not know any possible thing, including irrelevant things. He rather knows whatever is relevant. In this sense, the “omni” in omniscience (in Sanskrit: the sarva in sarvajña) is understood in a selective way, just like the “omni” in omnivore, which does not mean that one eats books or musical tunes.

Similarly, Advaita Vedānta authors stressed the identity of omniscience with complete knowledge of what is relevant, namely the only reality which is not illusory, the brahman. In this sense, omniscience has a very limited range of application, and yet covers whatever is not illusory.

Can human beings achieve omniscience?
Most schools accepting omniscience deem that human beings could achieve it, although only with much effort. In this sense, omniscience is usually considered the result of yogipratyakṣa `intellectual intuition’, the immediate grasp of whatever content. It needs to be direct, since inference and the other instruments of knowledge are known to ultimately depend on perceptual data and perception cannot grasp neither past nor future things (nor any other thing which is remote in space or remote because of other hindering conditions, for instance other people’s minds), so that omniscience needs to be based on a direct and independent access to such things.

It is not by chance that yogipratyakṣa literally means `the perception of the yogin’, since it was often first mentioned in connection with the special powers which yogin alone are said to be able to grasp. However, yogins are, unlike ṛṣis, not beyond human reach. They are considered to be a possible development among special but not anormal human beings.

Basing on the same elements, the authors of the Mīmāṃsā school altogether deny the possibility of omniscience. They explain that omniscience contradicts our experience, where knowledge always increases but never stops to be expandable. Moreover, no one could judge the omniscience of someone else. Thus, Mīmāṃsā authors say, the accounts about the Buddha’s omniscience cannot be trustworthy, since no one but an omniscient can vouch for someone else’s omniscience.

These were my first thoughts on the topic of omniscience. I will certainly add more about God’s omniscience in the next weeks. What strikes you about omniscience in India?