11 Facts About Dignaga

Dignaga's work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology .

Dignaga was born in Simhavakta near Kanchipuram and very little is known of his early years, except that he took Nagadatta of the Pudgalavada school as his spiritual preceptor, before being expelled and becoming a student of Vasubandhu.

For Dignaga, perception is pre-verbal, pre-conceptual and unstructured sense data.

For Dignaga, sensation is inerrant, it cannot "stray" because it is the most basic and simple phenomenon of experience or as he puts it:.

Also, for Dignaga, pratyaksa is mostly phenomenalist and is not dependent on the existence of an external world.

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Anumana for Dignaga is a type of cognition which is only aware of general attributes, and is constructed out of simpler sensations.

Central issue which concerned Dignaga was the interpretation of signs or the evidence which led one to an inference about states of affairs; such as how smoke can lead one to infer that there is a fire.

Dignaga's epistemology, argues Hayes, is a way to express and practice the traditional Buddhist injunction to not become attached to views and opinions.

Dignaga considered the interpretation of conventional and symbolic signs such as the words and sentences of human language to be no more than special or conventional instances of the general principles of inference or anumana.

Dignaga takes up several issues relating to language and its relationship to inference in the fifth chapter of his Pramana-samuccaya.

Dignaga founded a tradition of Buddhist epistemology and reasoning, and this school is sometimes called the "School of Dignaga" or "The school of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti" .