Preliminaries

Abstract

Diṅnāga was an Indian Buddhist philosopher who most probably wrote in the first half of the sixth century of the Common Era and who devoted a great deal of his literary career to investigating various issues in epistemology, the science devoted to the nature of knowledge and its limits. As a specific part of this larger concern, Diṅnāga (whose name is frequently encountered in its alternative spelling of Diṅnāga) was interested in the nature and limitations of information that is gained through the interpretation of signs. The interpretation of natural signs, that is, of properties such as smoke that can be understood as signifying the presence of fire, was investigated under the general heading of inference or reasoning (anunāna), or more specifically, reasoning for oneself (svārthānumāna). The interpretation of conventional signs, that is, of the words and sentences of human language and other systems of deliberately contrived symbols whose usage is governed by human-made conventions, was investigated separately as a subject unto itself, although Diṅnāga explicitly regarded the interpretation of deliberately contrived symbols as no more than a special application of the principles of inference in general. The principal purpose of this book is to come to an understanding of Diṅnāga’s views on the interpretation of signs, both natural and conventional.