your bridge home
The Great Arguments
You cannot say a thing both is and is not, said every opponent he had, and expect anybody to take you seriously.
Somebody had to answer Dharmakirti, and the Jains sent their best.
Akalanka lived from about 720 to 780 CE, a Digambara Jain, contemporary with the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I. He is called the master of Jain logic.
And the reason he was needed is that the Buddhist logicians had just made life very difficult for everybody.
Dignaga and Dharmakirti had built an epistemology so rigorous that no school could ignore it. Only two means of knowledge. Only the momentary particular is real. Universals are fictions. And a demand, applied to everybody, that you justify your position by an accepted instrument of knowledge or withdraw it.
For Jainism this was awkward in a specific way.
The Jain position looks, at first glance, like exactly the sort of thing that machinery is designed to destroy.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.