Dignaga Quotes on Knowledge
Dignāga (c. 480 – c. 540 CE), the founder of the Buddhist school of epistemology and logic (pramāṇavāda), gave classical Indian philosophy its most rigorous reduction of the means of valid cognition to two: perception (pratyakṣa), which presents the bare particular without conceptual construction, and inference (anumāna), which operates on conceptual constructions formed by the negative process Dignāga's apoha theory analyzes. The framework, developed at length in the Pramāṇasamuccaya, displaces the four-fold scheme of the Naiyāyikas in favor of a tighter dual epistemology in which conceptual cognition is treated as the systematic exclusion of what the term in question is not. The position would be carried forward by Dharmakīrti and dominate classical Indian epistemology for the following millennium.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Dignaga:
“There are two valid means of knowledge: perception and inference.”
-
Attributed to Dignaga:
“Perception is free from conceptual construction.”
-
Attributed to Dignaga:
“A word picks out its object by excluding what it is not.”
-
Attributed to Dignaga:
“The two means of knowledge correspond to the two kinds of objects.”
-
“All men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and his Church, and to embrace it and hold on to it as they come to know it.”
1.2 -
“This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”
§ 2