Dr. Patrick McAllister: Vividness, Truth, and Knowledge - Prajñākaragupta’s Reconfiguration of Dharmakīrti

22 January 2020

Am Mittwoch, 22.01.2020, um 16 Uhr in ESA-Ost, Raum 120.

Quite a few famous tenets of the sixth to seventh century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti are maintained on the basis of strong and general distinctions: momentariness defines the realm of the real; awareness must be of two kinds, either perceptual or conceptual; the object of perception is a real thing, that of conceptual cognition is not; knowledge must be either perceptual or inferential.

This talk first investigates how a Buddhist author of the eighth to ninth century, Prajñākaragupta, rearranges some of these central dichotomies in Dharmakīrti’s explanation of knowledge in unenlightened beings, focusing on the notions of a cognition’s truth, its justification, and its proper object.  The talk will then examine the influence that this reinterpretation had on later authors, specifically Jñānaśrīmitra and Ratnakīrti. They explicitly acknowledge Prajñākaragupta as an authority but are only rarely interpreted in that light.

• Click here to download the invitation [PDF]

Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk (Director)
Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC-TBTS)
Abteilung für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, AAI, Universität Hamburg
Alsterterrasse 1, D-20354 Hamburg