Dignāga

Who was Dignāga?

Dignāga was an Indian scholar and one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic.

He was born into a Brahmin family in Simhavakta, and very little is known of his early years, except that he took as his spiritual preceptor Nagadatta of the Vatsiputriya school, before being expelled and becoming a student of Vasubandhu. This branch of Buddhist thought defended the view that there exists a kind of real personality independent of the elements or aggregates composing it.

Among Dignaga's works there is Hetucakra, considered his first work on formal logic, advancing a new form of deductive reasoning. It may be regarded as a bridge between the older doctrine of trairūpya and Dignaga's own later theory of vyapti which is a concept related to the Western notion of implication.

Other works include The Treatise on the Objects of Cognition, The Treatise on Systems of Cognition, and The Treatise on the Correct Principles of Logic, produced in an effort to establish what were the valid sources of knowledge.