DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - The Law of Contradiction, Otherness and Excluded Middle

**irridgita** · 06-07-2011, 02:56 PM

A bigger picture of what Buddhist Logic is can be obtained from the work of Dharmakirti - ‘A Short Treatise of Logic’.

From the section on Buddhism at Wikipedia, about Dharmakirti (7th century):

Collins (2000: p. 240) colourfully contextualized Dharmakirti and his experience of disaffection and collegiate misunderstanding at Nalanda:-

"...... Dharmakirti himself was a lay Buddhist, not a devout monk, and his personal tone sounds like secular ambition rather than a quest for salvation. The closing stanza of his great work laments the dearth of capable intellectuals to follow his philosophy: "My work will find no one in this world who would easily grasp its deep sayings. It will be absorbed and perish in my own person, just as a river in the ocean."

A Tibetan historian says that when he finished the work, his pupils showed no appreciation, and his enemies "tied up the leaves [of the palm-leaf manuscript] to the tail of a dog and let him run through the streets where the leaves became scattered" (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:35-36).

In fact, Dharmakirti did end up dominating the leading philosophers of the last generations of Indian Buddhism. But his pessimism was prescient. Leaving Nalanda, he retired to his home in the south, where he founded a monastery. The next successful Brahman student from the south was to be Shankara, and when he came north, it would be to plunder the carcass of a dying [Indian] Buddhism."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmakirti

06-07-2011, 02:56 PM	#29
irridgita Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 470 Senior Member	A bigger picture of what Buddhist Logic is can be obtained from the work of Dharmakirti - ‘A Short Treatise of Logic’. From the section on Buddhism at Wikipedia, about Dharmakirti (7th century): Collins (2000: p. 240) colourfully contextualized Dharmakirti and his experience of disaffection and collegiate misunderstanding at Nalanda:- "...... Dharmakirti himself was a lay Buddhist, not a devout monk, and his personal tone sounds like secular ambition rather than a quest for salvation. The closing stanza of his great work laments the dearth of capable intellectuals to follow his philosophy: "My work will find no one in this world who would easily grasp its deep sayings. It will be absorbed and perish in my own person, just as a river in the ocean." A Tibetan historian says that when he finished the work, his pupils showed no appreciation, and his enemies "tied up the leaves [of the palm-leaf manuscript] to the tail of a dog and let him run through the streets where the leaves became scattered" (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:35-36). In fact, Dharmakirti did end up dominating the leading philosophers of the last generations of Indian Buddhism. But his pessimism was prescient. Leaving Nalanda, he retired to his home in the south, where he founded a monastery. The next successful Brahman student from the south was to be Shankara, and when he came north, it would be to plunder the carcass of a dying [Indian] Buddhism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmakirti
	Quote