Dharmakīrti

Dharmakirti
Dharmakirti
Religion	Buddhism
Flourished	6th or 7th century
Religious career
Works	Pramanavarttika

Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 6th or 7th century) was an influential Indian Buddhist philosopher who worked at Nālandā. He was one of the key scholars of epistemology (pramana) in Buddhist philosophy, and is associated with the Yogācāra and Sautrāntika schools. He was also one of the primary theorists of Buddhist atomism. His works influenced the scholars of Mīmāṃsā, Nyaya and Shaivism schools of Hindu philosophy as well as scholars of Jainism.

Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika, his largest and most important work, was very influential in India and Tibet as a central text on pramana ('valid knowledge instruments') and was widely commented on by various Indian and Tibetan scholars. His texts remain part of studies in the monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism.

Little is known for certain about the life of Dharmakirti. Tibetan hagiographies suggest he was a Brahmin born in South India and was the nephew of the Mīmāṃsā scholar Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. When he was young, Kumārila spoke abusively towards Dharmakirti as he was taking his brahminical garments. This led Dharmakirti to take the robes of the Buddhist order instead, resolving to "vanquish all the heretics." As a student of Buddhism, he first studied under Isvarasena, and later moved to Nalanda where he interacted with 6th century Dharmapala. However, the accuracy of the Tibetan hagiographies is uncertain, and scholars place him in the 7th-century instead. This is because of inconsistencies in different Tibetan and Chinese texts, and because it is around the middle of 7th-century, and thereafter, that Indian texts begin discussing his ideas, such as the citation of Dharmakirti verses in the works of Adi Shankara. Dharmakīrti is placed by most scholars to have lived between 600–660 CE, but a few place him earlier.

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