The Man Who Changed What Counted as an Argument

Dignaga changed the rules of the argument, and after him nobody in India could philosophise the old way.

Dignaga lived roughly 470 to 540 CE, born near Kanchi in the south into a Brahmin family. He was ordained into the Vatsiputriya order, and then broke with them, which is the first thing worth knowing about him.

The Vatsiputriyas were the awkward Buddhists. They held, against the mainstream, that there is a pudgala, a person, not the eternal self of the Hindu schools, but not simply a bundle of momentary states either. Something in between, which is neither identical with the aggregates nor different from them.

Dignaga would not have it. He left, and went eventually to Nalanda, and spent his life on a question the argument about the self had made unavoidable: how does anybody know anything at all?

The epistemic turn

That question was not new. What Dignaga did was make it compulsory.

Before him, Indian philosophical schools argued largely by exposition and by appeal to their own authoritative texts. After him, that was no longer sufficient. If you wanted to assert something you had to be able to say what kind of knowledge it was, by what instrument you had it, and why that instrument was reliable.

The scholars McCrea and Patil call this the epistemic turn, and it reorganised Indian philosophy for the next thousand years. Nyaya, Mimamsa, Vedanta, the Jain logicians, all of them had to build epistemologies, and all of them built theirs partly as answers to him.