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An Early Buddhist Text on Logic: Fang Bian Xin Lun

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Abstract

The Fang Bian Xin Lun is a text on Buddhist logic which is thought to be the earliest one still to be extant. It appears in Chinese only (T1632). The great Italian indologist Giuseppe Tucci, believing that the text was originally a Sanskrit text, translated it into Sanskrit and gave it the title Upāyahṛdaya. The paper provides the historical background of the development of logic in Classical India up to the time of this text, summarizes its content and translates its first section.

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Notes

  1. The Chinese title is (dà -zhèng dà-záng-jīng). Since the standard edition of this text was last printed in Japan over the period from 1922 to 1933, scholars refer to the canon by the Japanese pronunciation of its title.

  2. The texts which appear are numbered consecutively. It is customary to refer to the text by its number in the Taishō edition, prefixed by the letter ‘T’. This text is number 1632. So, it is referred to as ‘T.1632’.

  3. These rules refer to rules applicable to a system of notation. The Indians never developed a system of notation for argumentation. To say that they employed arguments of this form is to say that they made arguments in Sanskrit or Pali, whose counterparts in a notation system are called by these names.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, H3A 1G5

    Brendan S. Gillon

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  1. Brendan S. Gillon
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Correspondence to Brendan S. Gillon.

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Gillon, B.S. An Early Buddhist Text on Logic: Fang Bian Xin Lun. Argumentation 22, 15–25 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9076-5

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