Platonic universal; but ultimately meaning goes beyond language and distinc-
tion. Only Brahman exists, the distinctionless ultimate. The phenomenal world
appears by making distinctions within Brahman; these are due to Brahman’s
primary manifestation, the power of time, which produces grammatical tenses
in language and all the apparent differentiations of experience.
Bhartrihari is the hinge around which changes turn on both sides of the
intellectual field.^43 On the side of Hindu orthodoxy, he repudiated Nyaya-
Vaisheshika pluralism, as well as the Mimamsa language philosophy which
gave primacy to individual syllables, and launched arguments for monism and
the doctrine of world illusion that would culminate in the Advaita. On the
Buddhist side, Bhartrihari’s younger contemporary at Nalanda was Dignaga
(ca. 480–540). Direct network contact was thus likely between the greatest star
of medieval Buddhism and the most important early Hindu philosopher. Often
quoting his predecessor, Dignaga adopted Bhartrihari’s notion that experienced
reality consists in verbal constructions which promote ultimately unreal dis-
tinctions, while giving the argument a traditionally Buddhist thrust toward
negation.
Dignaga’s Epistemology of Negation. In the debating schools, Dignaga made
a stir by reducing the syllogism from five members to three. This looks like a
simple elimination of redundancy, but it implies a shift to a higher level of
abstraction, focusing on the logical core and away from the concern with
procedures of debate which characterized the Nyaya. Simultaneously Dig-
naga eliminated the traditional discussion of quibbles and other tactical fal-
lacies, and expanded the classification of syllogistic argument. The treatise
on logic became a vehicle for developing philosophical positions, displacing
the unwieldy Abhidharma-style compendium. The Buddhist “Nyaya-vadins”
amounted to a good deal more than a technical reform in logic; they became
the most famous school within later Indian Buddhism by their synthesis of
Buddhist doctrines and their attack on the Hindu schools.
Dignaga attacked the common epistemology of Nyaya, Vaisheshika, and
Mimamsa. All these held a realist position, taking raw sensory perception as
a basis for valid knowledge. Indeed, the Mimamsakas described perception as
the physical transmission of a beam from the eye to the object, grasping its
form and carrying it back to the observer (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:23). Samkhya
held that the senses actually become the objects perceived; seeing involves
becoming the color seen (EIP, 1987: 99).
Dignaga reduced the sources of knowledge to two (the lists of the Hindu
schools had included as many as six): sensory perception and inference which
follows from it. Perception is always of particulars; and since experience
consists only in particulars, it is inutterable, an indexical “thusness.” All words
External and Internal Politics: India • 231