like Leibniz’s criticism of “the labyrinth of the continuum”; one cannot say
that there is an enduring, extended “thing” which comes in and out of exist-
ence, nor does it make causal hops between rests. Extension and duration, like
all concepts, are merely distinctions imposed by the mind. Dharmakirti gave
Buddhism an aspect of both idealism and realism. The world really exists, it
is not merely mind; but the ordinary world of distinct and enduring objects is
mentally constructed, not the inutterable “thus-ness” of reality. Because of
Dharmakirti’s skill as a synthesizer, subsequent commentators and historians
of Buddhist philosophy classified him in many different camps.
Dharmakirti synthesized Buddhism in a form which maximally opposed
the dominant positions in Hindu philosophy up to this time: the pre-Advaita
period when Hindus held the realist side of the field.^49 Against Uddyotakara’s
Nyaya criticism as to whether causal efficacy is itself real, the Buddhist replies
that reality is not a stable quality that is added on; to be real is only to be
causally efficacious, and it is superfluous to add that causal efficacy is causally
efficacious. In the same way, it is no conundrum to say that non-existence does
not exist; it is only a name, “a flower in the sky” (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:90).
There is no alternation between reals and moments of producing the next real;
one cannot say momentariness has any duration in reality. This has meaning
only in the realm of mental inference.
Dharmakirti’s synthesis is the apex of Buddhist philosophy, at the moment
when it was institutionally fading. Nalanda was still bustling, buoyed by
cosmopolitan incursions of Brahmans and lay students, but the weeds were
growing around the deserted stupas not just in the south but in northern India
as well. Dharmakirti is the last flaming of the torch before it blows out, the
owl of Minerva taking wing at dusk: the creativity of synthesis as a fading
institutional base goes on the defensive. Dharmakirti himself was a lay Bud-
dhist, 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 apprecia-
tion, 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 Bud-
dhism. But his pessimism was prescient. Leaving Nalanda, he retired to his
home in the south, where he founded a monastery. The next successful Brah-
man student from the south was to be Shankara, and when he came north, it
would be to plunder the carcass of a dying Buddhism.
240 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths