Dignaga's Investigation of the Percept ─ A Philosophical Legacy in India and Tibet

Investigation of the Percept is a short (eight verses and a three page autocommentary) work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014.

This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text.

This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception.

Douglas Duckworth is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University.

Malcolm David Eckel is a Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University.

Jay L. Garfield is Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor of Humanities and Head of Studies in Philosophy at Yale-NUS College, Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, Recurrent Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Smith College, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies.

John Powers is Professor of Asian Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

Yeshes Thabkhas is Professor Emeritus of Indian Buddhist Philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies.

Sonam Thakchoe is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania and Director of the University of Tasmania Buddhist Studies in India Program.