Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c26.s2.7

c26.s2.7

Still more important was Dignāga’s doctrine of inference; it seems to have rested on the assurance that knowledge did not express real relations of external character; the relation of ground and conclusion (anumānānumeya-bhāva) rests upon the relation of inherence and essence, quality and subject (dharmadharmi-bhāva), which is imposed by thought (buddhyārūḍha). The doctrine harmonizes entirely with his doctrine of perception, for the product there is a creation of imagination (kalpanā, utprekṣā), and all that is left undecided is the nature of the contact in simple perception with some reality; nothing hinders¹ to accept this reality as merely a mental creation, a projection of the basic consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna), but for logic the point is unimportant. The power of the mind to impose laws on phenomena affords us the possibility of those general prepositions (vyāpti) on which all reasoning rests, and enables Dignāga to develop a true syllogism: Sound is non-eternal, because it is produced; all the produced are non-eternals, like a pot; no non-produced are non-eternals, like ether. The examples serve to illustrate, but the general law is one of the intellect.