Hindu in the Buddhist camp—attacked Nyaya-Vaisheshika pluralist realism
and its identification of each word with a self-subsistent reality. Rather, he held,
there is a transcendent unit of meaning behind the spoken word; words make
merely artificial distinctions within a wordless, undifferentiated reality. Bhar-
trihari was a professional grammarian, for whom language was no mere col-
lection of names but a processual system. Combining grammar with a primal
religious ground, Bhartrihari depicts the world as constituted by Brahman
speaking, introducing differentiation into the undifferentiated; time emerges in
the eternal through grammatical tenses. Expanding far beyond static nominal-
ism, grammar is ontologized. Bhartrihari’s language-centered philosophy con-
trasts with the Platonic emanation of the world from Forms in the highest One.
In the case of the Greeks, the technical inspiration comes from geometry,
thereby giving a static and eternal image of the Forms, whereas Bhartrihari’s
model is based on syntax, giving a dynamic slant to the formal aspect of reality
while his religious motivation is to identify language with world illusion.
Bhartrihari was followed up on the Buddhist side by Dignaga, who contin-
ued the attack on the realist and sensory epistemologies of the Hindu schools.
Sense perception is always of particulars; names are universals, and universals
do not exist. Dignaga continued to defend Buddhist turf, dissolving the reality
of ordinary objects by revealing them as mere “name-and-form.” Language is
the source of illusion, making permanences out of evanescent particulars.
Dignaga introduced negation as the central process of world construction.
Concepts are universals, encompassing all their instances; but the all can never
be shown. Hence words only demarcate one thing from another by negation;
a cow is at best a “not-not-cow.” The undifferentiated unity of reality is divided
into illusory concretenesses by the negation inherent in verbal thought.^15
The last great Buddhist philosopher, Dharmakirti, combines themes from
Nagarjuna and Dignaga into an epistemological-metaphysical synthesis. Real-
ity is that which is causally efficacious. Entities are differentiations imposed by
the mind, and are unreal because the causal chain cannot be broken into bits.
The world really exists and is not constructed by the mind, but it is not to be
identified with ordinary objects, which are mental constructs. Dharmakirti uses
a variant of the argument against the reality of relations (something like
Leibniz’s labyrinth of the continuum) to arrive at a position which parallels
Kant’s inconceivable thing-in-itself; but the ontological emphasis is shifted, in
the Buddhist point of view, to deny any validity to the categories of the
understanding. Time and space are unreal; the categories are the source of
illusion.
On the Hindu side of the field, upgrading to a high level of abstraction and
reflexivity came about as a previously ultra-conservative school, the Mimamsa,822 •^ Meta-reflections