arnold 2005

Asian PhilosophyVol. 15, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 77–111

Is SvasamEvitti Transcendental?

A Tentative ReconstructionFollowing S �aantaraks

Eita

Dan Arnold

Introduction1

There has emerged in recent years the recognition that the characteristically Buddhist

doctrine of svasamEvitti2 (‘apperception’, as I will render it for reasons to become

clear presently) was variously understood and developed in the Indian Buddhist

tradition. Thus, in his illuminating study particularly of some Tibetan debates

regarding this doctrine, Paul Williams identifies two principal understandings

of svasamEvitti that grow out of the Indian scholastic tradition. For some thinkers,

it seems to denote a special kind of (intentional) cognition—that kind, specifically,

whose object is other cognitions. When this claim is combined with the claim

that all cognitions must, in order to count as cognitions, be the objects of svasamEvitti

thus understood, the doctrine is clearly vulnerable to the charge of infinite

regress—that is (we will see), vulnerable to precisely the kind of critique against

svasamEvitti characteristically developed by the M�aadhyamika thinkers Candrak�iirti and

S�aantideva.3

But svasamEvitti was taken by other thinkers to denote whatever it is—and I will

suggest, as a plausible candidate, intentionality—that is constitutive of subjectivity. In

that case, to say of any cognition that it must involve svasamEvitti is just to say that it

exemplifies the feature in virtue of which sentient4 beings are to be distinguished as

such, apart from things like rocks. As Williams notes, this understanding of

svasamEvitti seems particularly to be the innovation of S�aantaraks

Eita.5 Recognizing this,

Williams is in a position to argue that the Tibetan thinker Mipham—who

understood the characteristically M�aadhyamika critiques of svasamEvitti as under-

mining only the claim that this is an ultimately existent phenomenon (while allowing

it to stand as conventionally real)—advanced the interpretation he did largely owing

Correspondence to: Dan Arnold, University of Chicago Divinity School, 1025 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637,

USA. Email: [email protected].

ISSN 0955-2367 print/ISSN 1469-2961 online/05/010077-111 � 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/0955236052000341050

to his having presupposed the doctrine of S�aantaraksEita; for as we will see, critiques

such as that developed by Candrak�iirti do not have any purchase against svasamEvitti to

the extent that it is thus understood.

What I would like to suggest is that on the view that can be developed followingS�aantaraks

Eita, svasam

Evitti is usefully understood as something very much like Kant’s

transcendental unity of apperception. Understanding the idea that S�aantaraksEita

identifies as a specifically transcendental one can help more precisely to distinguish

his formulation from that of Dign�aaga (to whom the doctrine of svasamEvitti can be

traced). Thus reconstructing S�aantaraksEita’s view can also (more importantly) give us

the conceptual tools to appreciate why the critique of svasamEvitti advanced by

Candrak�iirti does not—indeed, cannot—coherently be thought to undermineS�aantaraks

Eita’s version.6 So characterizing S�aantaraks

Eita’s innovation also has the

advantage that it can help us appreciate the extent to which Indian debatesconcerning svasam

Evitti quite closely parallel similar discussions in post-Kantian

philosophy; for Kant’s own statements of his doctrine of the ‘transcendental unity ofapperception’ were susceptible of comparably divergent interpretations—a further

indication that we are on something like the same conceptual ground here.Accordingly, I will begin to develop this proposal by first considering the various

ways in which Kant expressed his understanding of the ‘transcendental unity of

apperception’, and by indicating the two chiefly divergent understandings of it thatemerged in the course of subsequent philosophical discussion. I will then sketch

Dign�aaga’s initial statement and defense of the doctrine of svasamEvitti, identifying

some ways in which that maps onto one of the attested interpretations of Kant. We

will then consider the critique of Dign�aaga developed by Candrak�iirti, noting wherethis critique may hit its target.

I will then introduce S�aantaraksEita’s statement of the doctrine. Given the brevity of

S�aantaraksEita’s expressions on the matter (regarding which he does not advance an

argument so much as he stipulates a definition), it will be useful to develop thisstatement with reference to philosophical developments of Dign�aaga’s trajectory ofthought particularly in the hands of Dharmottara—and with reference, as well, to the

later figure of MoksE�aakaragupta, who interestingly combines S�aantaraks

Eita and

Dharmottara at the point where he adduces the former’s doctrine of svasamEvitti as

authoritative. This trajectory of thought will, further, be reconstructed with referenceto the other principal interpretation of Kant’s doctrine—the more properly

transcendental one.We will see, in concluding, that Candrak�iirti’s arguments fail to undermine the

understanding of svasamEvitti that can be developed following S�aantaraks

Eita—with the

invulnerability of S�aantaraksEita’s view now expressed as a function of its being a

basically transcendental idea. More precisely, while Candrak�iirti’s critique targets the

view on which svasamEvitti is considered a particular kind of intentional cognition

(considered, that is, to display intentionality), S�aantaraksEita’s is more like the view that

svasamEvitti is itself ‘intentionality’. Among other things, this difference has far-

reaching implications with respect to conceptions of truth and objectivity; for it is

precisely to the extent that thinkers like Dign�aaga take svasamEvitti as an example of

78 Dan Arnold

‘perception’ (and indeed, as the uniquely indubitable kind) that they cannot finally

take it as capable of being involved with what Kant considered to be objective

judgments. On S�aantaraksEita’s understanding, in contrast, the way is (at least in

principle) open to entertaining something other than subjective occurrences as the

locus of truth—though whether that is how S�aantaraksEita deployed the idea is another

question.

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Unity of Apperception’

Kant’s notion of the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’—or, as he also referred

to this idea, ‘pure apperception’, ‘original apperception’, and the ‘synthetic original

unity of apperception’—is foundational for the entire Kantian edifice.7 This idea

is pivotal for Kant’s ‘ Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the

Understanding’; for it is the basis for the claim that all experience is demonstrably

structured in terms of the basic categories that Kant enumerates. It is, indeed,

the transcendental unity of apperception from which these categories are ‘deduced’.

These categories, in turn, represent the basis of Kant’s entire claim to have developed

a philosophical project that can be taken to concern the objective validity

of knowledge. Thus, while Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ famously turned attention

away from objects in the world (‘things-in-themselves’) and towards the knowing

subject—by emphasizing that we could never have immediate cognitive acquaintance

with things-in-themselves, but only with things-as-they-appear-to-us—it was

because Kant thought he could show that how things appear to us is necessarily

structured in certain ways that he nevertheless claimed to trade in objectively valid

judgments.All of this is because the categories could, Kant argued, be derived from one

irreducibly primitive fact: that having any experience at all necessarily presupposes

the imposition of some perspectival unity on the relatively discrete data of perception

or (Kant’s term) ‘intuition’—subjectivity must, that is, consist in the ordering or

‘synthesis’ of the various causally efficacious ‘impingements by the world on a

possessor of sensory capacities’, in John McDowell’s phrase (1996, p. xv). Kant’s table

of categories then represents simply the various ways in which this basic fact can be

expressed. This is why Kant could say that the transcendental unity of apperception is

‘therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the

understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental

philosophy. Indeed, this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself ’ (1965,

B134, note). Clearly stating the role this plays in the grounding of objectively valid

judgments, Kant emphasized that ‘[o]nly the original unity is objectively valid; the

empirical unity of apperception, upon which we are not here dwelling, and which

besides is merely derived from the former under given conditions in concreto, has

only subjective validity’ (B140).

While it is thus pivotal for his project, though, Kant had a hard time expressing

clearly just what the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ is—a fact reflected not

only in the variety of terms he uses for it, but in his having developed the idea rather

Is svasamEvitti transcendental? 79

differently in the second edition of the first Critique. This is, indeed, among the

points regarding which the two editions of the Critique most significantly differ. Inthe first edition, Kant develops the point in ways, I think, that clearly respond to

Hume’s account of personal identity. Hume had famously argued that there wasnothing more to a person than a ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions, which

succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux andmovement’. For Hume, our misleading convictions regarding the continuity and

unity of such events were a function only of recognition or memory—of thosecausally produced states, that is, whose phenomenological content in some way‘resembled’ that of other such states:

For as such a succession answers evidently to our notion of diversity, it can only beby mistake we ascribe to it an identity; and as the relation of parts, which leads usinto this mistake, is really nothing but a quality, which produces an association ofideas, and an easy transition of the imagination from one to another, it can only befrom the resemblance, which this act of the mind bears to that, by which wecontemplate one continu’d object, that the error arises.8

Kant rejoins by elaborating a compelling question: how could we even recognizetwo moments as similar without already presupposing the very continuity putativelyexplained by this recognition? Thus,

If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought amoment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be useless.For it would in its present state be a new representation which would not in anyway belong to the act whereby it was to be gradually generated. The manifold of therepresentation would never, therefore, form a whole, since it would lack that unitywhich only consciousness can impart to it. (1965, A103)

Kant’s strategy here displays the constitutively transcendental logic that is hispreoccupation throughout. That is, he can thus argue that Hume’s own account

(his own denial of a point like Kant’s) necessarily presupposes Kant’s point. ‘ Theremust be something’, Kant says, ‘which, as the a priori ground of a necessary syntheticunity of appearances, makes their reproduction possible . . . . For experience as such

necessarily presupposes the reproducibility of appearances’ (A100–101).But Kant states his point in ways that clearly invite various readings. Thus, for

example,

This transcendental unity of apperception forms out of all possible experiences,which can stand alongside one another in one experience, a connection of all theserepresentations according to laws. For this unity of consciousness would beimpossible if the mind in knowledge of the manifold could not become consciousof the identity of function whereby it synthetically combines it in one knowledge.(A108)

This way of putting the point raises the question: just what sort of ‘thing’ is it that isthus the locus (the agent) of such apparent actions as ‘synthetically combining’,

‘becoming conscious’, and ‘forming’ of experiences?The problem, then, is that this way of expressing the matter seems to imply an

empirical locus of these actions, something for which criteria of identity could be

80 Dan Arnold

adduced—which is to say, the problem is how this putatively ‘transcendental’

condition relates to (or whether indeed it must in some sense be) the empirical self.9

In this regard, Strawson helpfully characterizes most likely objections to Kant’s point

as thus turning on the point that ‘the ascription of states to a subject require[s] the

subject itself to be an intuitable object for which there exist empirically applicable

criteria of identity’ (Strawson, 1966, p. 107). It is, I think, something like this

problem that Kant has in mind in restating the argument in the second edition of the

Critique, where the emphasis is rather more on a strictly logical condition of the

possibility of experience. Thus:

It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations;for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thoughtat all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible,or at least would be nothing to me. That representation which can be given priorto all thought is entitled intuition.10 All the manifold of intuition has, therefore,a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifoldis found. But this representation is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannotbe regarded as belonging to sensibility.11 I call it pure apperception, to distinguishit from empirical apperception, or, again, original apperception, because it is thatself-consciousness which, while generating the representation ‘I think’ . . .cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation. (B131–132)

Despite this emphasis simply on its necessarily being possible that all experiences

(if they are to count as such) be expressed as the object of some subject’s judgment,

Kant’s restatement of the doctrine retains expressions that invite questions about

criteria of identity—as, for example, when he says that ‘the manifold representations,

which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they

did not all belong to one self-consciousness’ (B132).The subsequent course particularly of German philosophy can arguably be

understood in terms of the divergent interpretations of which Kant’s statements here

will admit. This is nicely brought out by Robert Pippin, who argues that the

philosophical project of Hegel is usefully understood as framed vis-a-vis Kant’s

‘transcendental unity of apperception’ (and this despite the relative paucity of clear

discussions of Kant in Hegel’s corpus). Contextualizing this project, Pippin

distinguishes what he calls the ‘logical condition’ reading of Kant’s point from a

much different, ‘Cartesian’ reading. On the former, ‘Kant is clearly referring to

apperception as a logical condition, that it must be logically possible for me to ascribe

my representations to myself . . . ’ (Pippin, 1989, p. 20). On the latter reading, in

contrast, ‘all consciousness, including what Kant is calling experience, is a species of

self-consciousness, representing objects is at the same time attending to the mind’s

activities and objects’ (ibid.).As we will see, the latter claim might just as well express the view of svasam

Evitti

advanced by Dign�aaga. We can anticipate this point by noting that at least some

developments of this reading of Kant turn out to be vulnerable to the same kind of

critique that the M�aadhyamikas Candrak�iirti and S�aantideva will direct at Dign�aaga and

his successors. Thus, for example, some of Fichte’s formulations of the Kantian


doctrine seem to take that as claiming that all episodes of intentional consciousness

are necessarily accompanied by an additional intentional consciousness. In theseformulations, the claim seems to be (in Pippin’s words) that ‘in ‘‘thinking a

thought’’, two mental events occur, or two two-place relations, between my thinkingand its thought, and between me and my thinking a thought’. But if that is the right

reading, then this doctrine is clearly vulnerable to what Pippin calls ‘the iterationproblem’:

If consciousness and self-consciousness are treated as separate aspects of anyconsciousness, then the arguments that showed why consciousness of X must beaccompanied by consciousness of consciousness of X would all apply to the lattertoo, since self-consciousness, at least as suggested by this version of Fichte, wouldalso be an instance of consciousness and so subject to its conditions. (Pippin, 1989,pp. 46–47)

That is, if it is thought that any act of consciousness must, in order to count as such,

be accompanied by a further act of consciousness, then the latter—again, if it is tocount as such—must in turn be accompanied by a yet further act. We will see that

this could serve just as well as a concise statement of the characteristicallyM�aadhyamika argument against Dign�aaga’s idea of svasam

Evitti.

But Kant seems to have had it in mind to head off precisely this sort of regress; as

(we saw) he says, his point in distinguishing ‘transcendental’ from ‘empirical’apperception was to emphasize that the former is ‘that self-consciousness which,

while generating the representation ‘‘I think’’ . . . cannot itself be accompanied by anyfurther representation’. More compellingly, if Kant’s doctrine is interpreted in the

way that Pippin finds reflected in Fichte, then we undermine our ability todistinguish, in the way that Kant very clearly wanted to, Kant’s point from the

Cartesian appeal to the ‘I think’. Indeed, the distinctiveness of Kant’s constitutivelytranscendental approach is perhaps most evident in his critique of Descartes, whose

famous argument Kant adduced as a paradigm case of a ‘Paralogism’—that is, anargument that trades on an equivocation concerning the key term.12 It is, then,precisely against Descartes that Kant urged: ‘In the synthetic original unity of

apperception I am conscious of myself not as I appear to myself, nor as I am inmyself, but only that I am. This representation is a thought, not an intuition’.13 In such

passages, Kant emphasizes not only that he does not mean (as Descartes arguablydid) to adduce a putatively foundational sort of epistemic ‘certainty’,14 but also (and

therefore) that we cannot draw any inferences from this fact about, say, the empiricalexistence of a soul; rather, as transcendental, Kant’s is the strictly formal point that a

condition of the possibility of our having any experience at all is that our experiences(sensations, memories, fantasies) are unfailingly experienced from some perspective,and that they be expressible as judgments.

We can develop Pippin’s other alternative—the ‘logical condition’ reading ofKant’s doctrine—with reference to Strawson, who lucidly reconstructs Kant’s basic

argument. Strawson is particularly concerned to jettison Kant’s reference to the actionof ‘synthesis’ (which, as an action, would seem to require an empirical agent), instead

developing the point that ‘the thesis of the necessary unity of consciousness can itself

82 Dan Arnold

be represented as resting on a yet more fundamental premise—on nothing more than

the necessity, for any experience at all to be possible, of the original duality of

intuition and concept’ (1966, p. 97). From the way that Strawson develops this

reading, I think it becomes clear that he does not thus have it in mind to argue

(contra Sellars) that we can have unmediated cognitive access to uninterpreted data;

rather, the point is (in Robert Brandom’s phrase) to urge that we necessarily

presuppose a difference between ‘what is said or thought and what it is said

or thought about’ (Brandom, 2000, p. 163)—with this reference to ‘aboutness’

suggesting that we may be talking here about intentionality.

To begin with, Strawson nicely states (as we have already seen) the recurrent line of

objection to Kant. Again, then, Kant ‘speaks of the ‘‘abiding self ’’ of transcendental

apperception; but he certainly does not mean by this the (at least relatively) abiding

man . . . . Yet if he rejects this interpretation of the ‘‘abiding self ’’, does he not

evacuate the notion of ascription of experiences to a subject of its ordinary meaning,

without producing anything to fill the vacuum?’ (pp. 102–103). Strawson rejoins,

though, that the main point of this objection can be ‘conceded without detriment to

the Kantian position. It is not essential for Kant to maintain that his provisions are

sufficient to explain the actual occurrence of self-ascription of experiences. It is

enough if they are necessary to its possibility’ (p. 103). And what is thus necessary is

simply that subjective experience be constitutively perspectival:

The more fundamental point of the Kantian provisions is that the experiencesof such a subject must themselves be so conceptualized as to determine a distinctionbetween the subjective route of his experiences and the objective worldthrough which it is a route. The history of a man, we might way, is—amongmuch else—an embodiment of a temporally extended point of view on the world.(p. 104)

And again:

What is necessary is that there be a distinction, though not (usually) an opposition,implicit in the concepts employed in experience, between how things are in theworld which experience is of and how they are experienced as being, between theorder of the world and the order of experience. This necessary doubleness is the realpoint of connexion between what Kant refers to as ‘original (or transcendental)self-consciousness’ on the one hand and the objectivity-condition on the other.(pp. 107–108)

This point has the considerable advantage of facilitating an appreciation

of the constitutively transcendental logic that Kant is here using against, say,

Hume—of facilitating, that is, an understanding of why Kant can think that even

Hume’s denial of his point necessarily presupposes precisely that point. Thus,

against the objection that the notion of ascribing experiences to a subject

presupposes (empirical) criteria of identity for such a subject, the answer is that if

‘subjects must be conceived of as perceptibly belonging to a common world, they

must also be conceived of as each having his own experience of that world.

Properly understood, the objector’s point does not contradict the Kantian point;

it includes it’ (p. 105). Strawson concludes by summarizing the extent to which he


has here reconstructed a point that he takes Kant only dimly and inadequately to

have developed:

. . . the simple-seeming notion of ‘a unitary consciousness to which diverseexperiences belong’ appears less and less adequate to express the fundamentalthought on which the argument rests. It yields its place, first, to that of thepossibility of empirical (personal) self-consciousness, then to that profoundernotion of transcendental self-consciousness, the necessary reflexiveness ofexperience, which appears as the basic condition of the possibility of empiricalself-consciousness. And it must do so; for it only expresses a coherent thoughtwhen interpreted in these terms. (p. 111)

But Strawson’s last point—that only on this reading does Kant’s insight reflect a

coherent thought—is, I think, one that Strawson better develops elsewhere. In

particular, Strawson’s Individuals—his 1959 ‘Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics’—

develops a transcendental argument with clear affinities to the one he reconstructs in

the foregoing consideration of Kant. Here, though, his approach is more

characteristic of those analytic philosophers who would defer particularly to ordinary

language. This is worth noting, since, as I have indicated, S�aantaraksEita does not really

argue for the interpretation of svasamEvitti he advances; rather, his understanding of

the matter is stated more in the form of a stipulated definition. Strawson’s alternative

statement of the basically Kantian argument, then, can give us a way to reconstruct

particularly S�aantaraksEita’s way of proceeding.

It is clear that the point Strawson develops in this way is recognizably the

same point he judges Kant to have grasped. Thus, Strawson here targets what he

characterizes as the ‘no-ownership’ view of subjective states—that is, the view

(arguably held by Hume) that mental events can coherently be thought not to be

constitutively perspectival. Against this, Strawson argues that experiences are

necessarily individuated with reference to their subjects, if it is to be ‘experiences’

that are being picked out at all: ‘It is not coherent [to deny this], in that one who

holds [the contrary view] is forced to make use of that sense of possession of which

he denies the existence, in pressing his case for the denial.’ This is because the defining

characteristic of the class of ‘experiences’ is that ‘they are ‘‘my experiences’’ or ‘‘the

experiences of some person’’, where the idea of possession expressed by ‘‘my’’ and

‘‘of ’’ is the one [the ‘‘no-ownership’’ theorist] calls into question’ (1959, p. 97). He

elaborates:

States, or experiences, one might say, owe their identities as particulars to theidentity of the person whose states or experiences they are. From this it followsimmediately that if they can be identified as particular states or experiences at all,they must be possessed or abscribable in just that way which the no-ownershiptheorist ridicules . . . . (Ibid.)

Here, then, we have what amounts to an interesting unpacking of Strawson’s claim

that Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ can only express a coherent

thought when it is interpreted in the way he suggested specifically with reference to

Kant. The point is that ‘experience’ is constitutively perspectival, such that it must

always be at least intelligible to distinguish any particular example of such from what

84 Dan Arnold

it is that is putatively experienced; and (the point we have now developed) this

cannot coherently be denied insofar as, most basically, this is just what we mean by‘experience’. That is, there is no way to individuate even those ‘experiences’ of which

this would be denied except with reference to some subject whose experiences theyare. It is literally nonsensical, then, to deny that feelings of, say, hot or cold must

always be someone’s feelings of such; our subjective states, by definition, are not free-floating and unassigned, but are invariably experienced as ours. Any ostensibly

designated phenomena that are not so identified are, ipso facto, not ‘experiences’, notwhat it is that we are here talking about.But again, this point (as both Strawson and Kant stress) is not such as to warrant

any inferences regarding empirically identifiable existents—not, for example, such asto warrant the conclusion that there must therefore exist souls as the loci of

perspectival unity. This, then, is why Kant could say that the phenomenon he meantto identify is ‘that self-consciousness which, while generating the representation

‘‘I think’’ . . . cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation’. This pointbecomes clear if (as I think we are entitled to do) we take Kant’s ‘transcendental unity

of apperception’, as here understood, to thematize something like the idea ofintentionality.15 That is, the idea that subjectivity is a constitutively perspectivalphenomenon—that, in Strawson’s words, the history of a person just is ‘an

embodiment of a temporally extended point of view on the world’—amounts to theidea that conscious states are about their contents. This is the claim, to put the point

conversely, that ‘the objective world through which’ any subject is a route is what thatsubject’s experience is of (or ‘about’).

If that is right, then the reason it makes sense for Kant to say that this phenomenon‘cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation’ is that he here means to

identify precisely that phenomenon which is displayed in any act of representing—precisely that phenomenon, that is, in virtue of which any act could count as an act of

representing. Thus, if we call the phenomenon thus picked out ‘intentionality’, thepoint is the deceptively straightforward one that the fact of intentionality is not itselfintentional. That is, insofar as Kant has here given us simply the criterion for

individuating tokens of the type experience (viz., that they be ascribable to somesubject), the point is simply that this criterion for thus individuating these is not

individuated by itself.Depending, then, on how we read Kant’s claims regarding the ‘transcendental

unity of apperception’, the point is either (with Fichte) that all intentional cognitionsare themselves at the same time intended by (are the objects of ) an additional

intentional cognition—one of the type ‘apperception’; or (with Strawson and, I think,with Kant) simply that the criterion for individuating experiences as such is that theybe intentional—that they be, that is, some subject’s experiences of some object. The

former reading has the distinct disadvantage not only of failing to account for Kant’sown attempts to distinguish his view from that of Descartes, but of entailing the

‘iteration’ problem. This is, I have said in anticipation, precisely what Candrak�iirti willargue with respect to Dign�aaga. On the alternative reading, in contrast, we are not only

in a position to appreciate how Kant could think he differed from Descartes, but also


(and more importantly) in a position to appreciate the claim that this ‘unity of

apperception’ is properly transcendental—that is, in the sense that it is necessarily

presupposed even in the very act of denying it. If, in contrast to Dign�aaga’s,

S�aantaraksEita’s account of svasam

Evitti can usefully be reconstructed as making

something like the same point, then we will be in a good position to appreciate its

invulnerability to Candrak�iirti’s critique. Let us turn, then, first to Dign�aaga.

SvasamEvitti in the Thought of Dign�aaga

It is well known that Dign�aaga (c. 480–540 CE)—and following him, Dharmak�iirti

(c. 600–660 CE)—developed a spartan epistemology that admitted only two

irreducible criteria of knowledge or justification, two ‘reliable warrants’ ( pram �aanEa):

‘sensation’ or ‘perception’ ( pratyaksEa), and ‘inference’ (anum �aana). The former

constitutively has as its object uniquely particular events or sensations (svalaksEanEa),

while the object of the latter is ‘universals’ or ‘abstractions’ (s �aam �aanyalaksEanEas).

Thus, for example, a perceptual cognition of a fire would be the kind of bare

cognitive occurrence that is produced by (again in McDowell’s phrase) ‘impinge-

ments by the world on a possessor of sensory capacities’—that is, this kind of

cognition would be distinguished by its being causally precipitated, under conditions

not necessarily of the subject’s choosing, by a really existent thing that, as it were,

presents itself to the subject, causally producing a certain representation. The resultant

phenomenological content of such a cognition, then, would necessarily be a function

of the size and color and shape of just this particular fire. An inferential cognition

of a fire, in contrast, would have as its content the kind of image of a fire that

appears before the mind’s eye whenever (say) one hears the word ‘fire’—something,

that is, that may very well appear the same way to a subject regardless of her

circumstances (and that may, indeed, present itself even in the absence of any

particular fire).16

While this may seem an intuitively plausible development of the insight that

Strawson characterized in terms of ‘the original duality of intuition and concept’, that

we are dealing with something different is clear when it is further urged (as it is by

Dign�aaga) that the only really occurrent sort of ‘perception’ has (in a sense that can be

variously specified) other mental events as its objects.17 Dign�aaga says as much in

developing a claim characteristically associated with all of the Buddhist thinkers in

the tradition of thought that he initiated—specifically, the claim that the word

pram �aanEa should finally be understood as referring not (as for most Indian

philosophers) primarily to such cognitive instruments as perception and inference,

but rather, to those cognitions that result from the exercise thereof.

In the terms first stated by Dign�aaga, and associated with his tradition thereafter,

this is the claim that the word pram �aanEa chiefly denotes the pram �aan

Eaphala, the result

or ‘fruit’ of a pram �aanEa—and that it is therefore only ‘figuratively’ (upac �aar �aat) that we

take the word pram �aanEa also to denote our cognitive instruments. As the second half of

Pram �aanEasamuccaya 1.8 puts it (in characteristically laconic terms), ‘Because of [its]

86 Dan Arnold

being comprehended along with its action, a pram �aanEa is real only as a result’.18

Dign�aaga’s auto-commentary explains:

In this regard, it is not the case, as for proponents of external objects, that a pram �aanEa

is something other than its result; rather, there arises a cognition, existing as theresult, containing the representation of an object; and this very [cognition] isunderstood as comprising the action [of a putatively ‘instrumental’ pram �aan

Ea].

Hence, the action is figuratively designated as being the pram �aanEa, though [the latter

is in fact] devoid of activity.19

The point, as Dign�aaga proceeds to make clear, is that when one has the experience of

(say) seeing a tree, all that can be said indubitably to have occurred is that a cognition

has arisen having that phenomenological aspect or representation ( �aak �aara or �aabh �aasa);

but that fact is explicable without reference to contact with anything external.20 Thus,

Dign�aaga asserts, in regard to cognitions whose phenomenological content is an

external object, that the only ‘cognitive instrument’ ( pram �aanEa) in play is simply the

fact of the cognition’s having that phenomenological content: ‘The pram �aanEa, [in the

sense of a cognitive instrument,] is [in this case] its being of the appearance of an

object’.21 Dign�aaga concludes: ‘Thus, [it should be understood that] the roles of the

means of cognition ( pram �aanEa) and of the object to be cognized ( prameya),

corresponding to differences of [aspect of] the cognition, are [only] figuratively

attributed to the respective [distinctive] factor in each case . . .’’.22 And again (in verse

form): ‘That which appears is the object known ( prameya), while the pram �aanEa and its

result are, [respectively,] the subjective aspect of [the cognition] (gr �aahak �aak �aara) and the

cognition [itself]; hence, these three are not separated’.23

This, then, is the context in which Dign�aaga brings into play that type of

‘perception’ ( pratyaksEa) which is ‘apperception’ (svasam

Evitti); thus, ‘Cognition arises

as appearing twofold: [having] the appearance of itself [as subject], and the

appearance of an object. In terms of these two appearances, the one that is

apperception (svasamEvitti) is the one that is the result.’24 To the extent, then, that

‘a pram �aanEa is real only as a result ’,25 and to the extent that that ‘result’ is (as Dign�aaga

here says) svasamEvitti, it turns out that the latter is the only really occurrent pram �aan

Ea

in any case—that, in other words, the only indubitably immediate cognition concerns

the occurrence of our own mental states. Of course, this is not typically regarded as

an example of ‘perception’, as that word is generally understood in English; but it is

important to recall that Dign�aaga has defined pratyaksEa only as being definitively ‘free

of conceptual elaboration’ (kalpan �aapodha).26 To say this much is not, ipso facto, to

say that ‘perception’ designates only sensory cognition, but simply that it denotes

whatever cognition immediately (that is, without the mediation of any concepts)

apprehends a uniquely particular object—which is as much as to say, that kind of

cognition whose phenomenological content is at the same time its direct object. And

we have now seen Dign�aaga argue that in the final analysis, svasamEvitti is the only

really occurrent type of such unmediated cognition.Richard Hayes has nicely expressed (in terms familiar from many modern versions

of empiricist foundationalism) the point that is advanced by thus arguing that the


only thing with which we are immediately acquainted is the contents of our own

mental states:

At least one of the reasons that one might regard acts of awareness as sensa is thatwe are perfectly safe in saying that the fact of awareness itself cannot be denied . . . .It may be that ‘Tomorrow is Friday’ is a false proposition at the time that itconstitutes the content of a thought, but it is impossible to be in error regarding itsbeing the content of the thought of which it seems to be the content . . . . Similarly,if one has an awareness of blue, blue is certainly the content of that particularawareness, even if there is in fact nothing blue outside the cognition for one to beaware of.27

That is, this is the one kind of cognition with respect to which, it can thus be claimed,

one cannot be mistaken. The foundational status of this putatively immediate

acquaintance is clear from its relation even to propositional judgments (even, that is,

to those constitutively discursive cognitions that are to be characterized by Dign�aaga

as ‘inferential’); for insofar as all instances of cognition have an ‘apperceptive’

dimension, there turns out to be a sense in which even inferential (and hence,

conceptual) cognitions are (as cognitions) themselves ‘perceived’—which is just to say

that our acquaintance even with the conceptual contents of our minds is itself alleged

to be, in a sense, non-conceptual.28

Given the position so far developed, Dign�aaga can be taken to have developed a

basically representationalist epistemology, one with clear affinities with the project of

empiricists like Locke. Thus, Locke similarly argued that ‘[s]ince the Mind, in all its

Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which

it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant

about them’ (1975, p. 525). For Dign�aaga, too, the point in urging that svasamEvitti is

the only really occurrent sort of cognition may be that the only finally indubitable

(because uniquely immediate) knowledge we can have (hence, the only finally

warranted knowledge) concerns the contents of our own mental states; for while we

can always doubt that the world is as it is represented in cognition, what we cannot

doubt is that cognition occurs.29

There is, though, a real question here whether Dign�aaga may thus be seen to

uphold something more like a full-blown metaphysical idealism than simply a

representationalist epistemology.30 As in many of the Western philosophical

discussions where idealism seems to lurk, though, it is an exegetically complex

matter which of two claims is being made: the ontological claim that mental events

are all that really exist, or the strictly epistemological claim that mental events (such

as representational ‘sense data’) are all that we can directly know. On either reading of

the foregoing arguments from Dign�aaga, though, we still have to face a question

concerning, most basically, the relationships that are thought to be involved in

cognition—and here, the issues start to resemble issues that arise given one reading

(the ‘Cartesian’ reading) of Kant’s doctrine of the ‘transcendental unity of

apperception’.Thus, even if Dign�aaga’s is understood as the strong idealist claim that mental

events are all that exist—and accordingly, that svasamEvitti is the only finally occurrent

88 Dan Arnold

sort of ‘perception’ insofar as all that exists is causally explicable mental events that

have a particular sort of phenomenological content—there is still the question of howthe different ‘aspects’ of these mental events are to be related to one another. How,

that is, does ‘whatever appears as the content’ of the cognition (yad �aabh �aasamE

prameyam) relate at once to the ‘cognition itself ’ (samEvitti) and its ‘subjective aspect’

(gr �aahak �aak �aara)?31 Another way, I think, to ask this question is to ask how cognitioncould seem invariably perspectival (could seem invariably to be cognition of

something), when there is finally nothing other than it for cognition to be about. Byexplaining the cognitive process with reference only to mental events, then, one hassimply deferred the need to explain the subject–object relation; for even if this

relation is thought to consist only in different ‘aspects’ (and not, e.g. in ontologicallydistinct ‘substances’), we still have two terms here. Put in terms of intentionality,

then, the problem is that Dign�aaga still has to explain how the ‘subjective aspect’(gr �aahak �aak �aara) can seem, phenomenologically, to mean something—how, in

particular, it can (seem to) be about (what seems to be) the ‘objective aspect’(gr �aahy �aak �aara).

If, however, Dign�aaga’s is simply the claim that only something like internal ‘sensedata’ can be the direct objects of cognition,32 there is still a question concerningthis putatively immediate acquaintance with these contents of our mental

events; specifically, how does this (non-conceptual, ‘perceptual’) sense of ourown mental states relate to the (conceptual, discursive) knowledge that we are

presumably trying to explain?33 For the claim that even propositional cognitions are,qua cognitions, in a sense ‘non-conceptual’ does not advance our understanding of

whatever judgment is expressed in the cognition in question—does not, for example,explain the success (the ‘objectivity’) of discursive thought, does not provide it with

sure foundations such as it would otherwise lack. Indeed, to the extent that onestresses (as, I think, Dign�aaga clearly means to) this aspect of (necessarily discursive)

judgments—to the extent one stresses, that is, that all that is finally certain about anyjudgment is the bare fact of its occurring to some subject—we end up forfeiting anymeaningful claims to objectivity, and are consigned instead to the sort of solipsism

that follows from taking subjective representations as the locus of truth orjustification.34

Be that as it may, what we have on either reading of Dign�aaga’s argument involvesthe idea that Pippin identified with respect to the Fichtean reading of Kant’s doctrine:

the idea, that is, that ‘in ‘‘thinking a thought’’, two mental events occur, or two two-place relations, between my thinking and its thought, and between me and my

thinking a thought’. Thus, if Dign�aaga’s appeal to svasamEvitti advances the claim that

only mental events finally exist, the two mental events whose co-occurrence requiresrelating are the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of any such moment; while if the

appeal to svasamEvitti advances simply a representationalist epistemology, the two

mental events to be related are (to take the case of one’s entertaining a proposition)

the conceptual thought one experiences oneself as having, and one’s non-conceptualawareness of the bare fact of having it. And in either case, the need to establish such a

relationship threatens to open up an infinite regress.35


Candrak�iirti’s critique of svasamEvitti

Something precisely like the foregoing criticism was developed by Dign�aaga’s

co-religionist Candrak�iirti, whose Madhyamak �aavat �aara comprises an influential

critique of svasamEvitti. The basic structure of that critique, though, is perhaps

more clearly on display in the first chapter of the Prasannapad �aa, where Candrak�iirti

briefly rehearses the argument from the Madhyamak �aavat �aara. The presentation of this

argument in the Prasannapad �aa is interesting because of the extent to which it does

not have to do particularly with epistemology or ontology. Rather, in his engagement

with Dign�aaga in the Prasannapad �aa, Candrak�iirti chiefly attacks the coherence of

Dign�aaga’s categories of explanation—and more particularly, the coherence of

Dign�aaga’s claim to offer a conventionally valid account of our epistemic practices,

while yet using words like svalaksEanEa in something other than their ordinary sense.36

Here, then, the basic structure of the argument (i.e. as simply concerning relations) is

most clearly on display; for Candrak�iirti’s arguments in regard to ordinary usage turn

(as is eminently conventional in Sanskritic philosophical discourse) on the Sanskrit

grammarians’ k �aaraka analysis of verbal constructions—on the view, that is, that

actions can invariably be analyzed on the model of semantically complete verbal

constructions, which require the separate specification of (e.g.) subject, object,

agent, etc.It is the normative presupposition of these relata that leads, in the course of

Candrak�iirti’s critique of Dign�aaga’s use of the term svalaksEanEa, inexorably to a

consideration of svasamEvitti. Thus, on Candrak�iirti’s view, ‘svalaks

EanEa’ means

(as indeed it conventionally means in Sanskrit) ‘defining characteristic’. But

Dign�aaga’s understanding of svalaksEanEas as the uniquely particular objects of

perception—as, indeed, radically distinct from the kinds of things (like ‘defining

characteristics’!) that can serve as the referents of word—requires, as Candrak�iirti

recognizes, that svalaksEanEas neither be nor have any properties at all.37 Candrak�iirti

thus attacks Dign�aaga on the grounds that he has, with his peculiarly technical

understanding of svalaksEanEa, incoherently posited something that is simply self-

characterizing—on the grounds, that is, that (in the grammatical terms character-

istically favored in Sanskritic philosophical discourse) the act of ‘characterizing’

seemingly referred to by Dign�aaga’s use of the word svalaksEanEa must involve an

‘instrument’ (laksEanEa) that is identical with the ‘object’ (laks

Eya) characterized

thereby.

In this context, Candrak�iirti anticipates that Dign�aaga might adduce svasamEvitti as

the unique example of precisely such a case—that is, if Dign�aaga can argue that there

obtains a sort of cognition whose subject is at the same time the object thereof, he will

have shown the possibility of something ‘self-characterizing’. It is, then, to this

anticipated move that Candrak�iirti thus responds:

Perhaps you think there exists [the faculty of] apperception (svasamEvitti). Hence,

[you maintain that], given that [cognition’s] being an object obtains due to [its]apprehension by apperception, [cognition] is included among warrantableobjects.38 To this we respond: based on an extensive refutation of apperception

90 Dan Arnold

in the Madhyamak �aavat �aara,39 it doesn’t make sense to say a svalaksEanEa

is characterized40 by another svalaksEanEa, and that one by apperception.

Moreover, this last [sort of] cognition [i.e. the one called svasamEvitti] doesn’t

exist at all, since—given that there’s no subject to be characterized (laksEya), owing

to the impossibility of [its] establishment by a separate svalaksEanEa—there is no

possibility of the operation of a characteristic without a locus.41

And, having thus referred the reader to his ownMadhyamak �aavat �aara, Candrak�iirti here

adds a lengthy quotation from the Ratnac �uudEaparipr

Ecch �aa S �uutra, the crucial part of

which is this:

Thought arises when there is an intentional object ( �aalambana). Is it, then, [the casethat] the intentional object is one thing, and the thought another? Or is that whichis the intentional object precisely the [same as] the thought? If, first of all, theintentional object is one thing and the thought another, then there will obtain [its]being two thoughts (dvicittat �aa). Or if the intentional object itself is the thought,then how does thought perceive thought? But thought does not perceive thought.Just as a sword-edge cannot be cut by that same sword-edge,42 and a finger-tipcannot be touched by that same finger-tip, in just the same way, a [moment of]thought cannot be seen by that same thought.43

At the end of the full passage, Candrak�iirti concludes: ‘ Thus, there is no [faculty of]

apperception; [and] since it is non-existent, what is characterized by what?’44 This

makes clear, again, that the discussion of svasamEvitti has in this context been chiefly

meant to address the possibility of there being something essentially self-

characterizing—of there being, that is, at least one example of a ‘characteristic’

(laksEanEa) that is not the characteristic of anything (which is how Dign�aaga must

understand svalaksEanEas)—or rather, of there being one example of a characteristic

which is at the same time the thing characterized (laksEya) thereby.45 Against this,

Candrak�iirti has argued that this idea opens an infinite regress—and in this way (as I

have already intimated), his point is much like the one that (Pippin noted) could be

leveled at the Fichtean version of Kant: ‘If consciousness and self-consciousness are

treated as separate aspects of any consciousness, then the arguments that showed why

consciousness of X must be accompanied by consciousness of consciousness of X

would all apply to the latter too, since self-consciousness, at least as suggested by this

version of Fichte, would also be an instance of consciousness and so subject to its

conditions.’That is, Candrak�iirti’s argument is, then, simply a statement of the extent to which

svasamEvitti can be thought to entail the ‘iteration problem’—as indeed is the case

on either of the interpretations that I have said can be gleaned from Dign�aaga’s

elaboration of the doctrine. It is important to note, though, the extent to which

Candrak�iirti’s version of that argument is informed particularly by Sanskritic

grammatical analyses; for not only does this tell us something distinctive about

characteristically Sanskritic philosophical discourse, but it shows as well that

Candrak�iirti takes Dign�aaga’s svasamEvitti as an action—that is, as some kind or episode

of cognition that will admit of the sort of agent–instrument–object analysis that can

necessarily be given for anything involving a verb.46 As we will now see, this is


precisely the point that S�aantaraksEita denies with respect to svasam

Evitti as he

understands it.

S�aantaraksEita’s innovation: Svasam

Evitti as a defining characteristic, not an action

In attempting to reconstruct S�aantaraksEita’s distinctive reading of svasam

Evitti, it is

useful to begin with the figure of Dharmottara (c. 740–800); for even if we grant

(with Krasser, 1992) that Dharmottara’s dates make him a likely respondent to

S�aantaraksEita (725–788), it is, in my view, Dharmottara’s significant revisions in the

trajectory of thought initiated by Dign�aaga47 that best make S�aantaraksEita’s innovation

intelligible—a point we can appreciate by seeing how the much later figure of

MoksE�aakaragupta (fl. 12th century) combines the thought of Dharmottara and

S�aantaraksEita.

To begin, then, with Dharmottara: chief among his revisions is his attempt to

qualify Dharmak�iirti’s exhaustively causal account of perception. Dharmottara wants,

that is, to urge that useful knowledge consists in something more than being the

effect produced by specifiable causal factors—that, in other words, any pram �aanEa

worth the name must involve some judgment.48 This is, of course, difficult for him to

allow, since, as a purportedly faithful interpreter of Dharmak�iirti, Dharmottara must

explain the outputs of perceptual cognition as being constitutively ‘unsuitable for

association with discourse’.49 Nevertheless, this seems to be precisely what

Dharmottara allows in the course of revising Dharmak�iirti’s account of perception.This emerges clearly when Dharmottara explains why (as for Dign�aaga and

Dharmak�iirti before him) the word pram �aanEa ought to be understood as referring

principally to the cognitive outputs of our epistemic practices. As we saw, Dign�aaga’s

point in pressing this claim was to urge that it is finally only ‘apperception’

(svasamEvitti) that counts as a pram �aan

Ea. Dharmottara, though, has different reasons

for endorsing this characteristically Buddhist view that the word pram �aanEa really

denotes only the pram �aanEaphala. His point is that only the result of the completed

process of cognition represents the kind of ‘knowledge’ that can be thought

pragmatically to further human ends (and that should therefore count as ‘pram �aanEa’).

Thus:

It is intentional cognition that is a reliable warrant ( pr �aapakamEjn �aanam

Epram �aan

Eam).

And the capacity for intentionality is not based only on invariable concomitancewith the [causally efficacious] object [that produced the cognition]; for things likesprouts are not intentional even though [their production is] invariablyconcomitant with [causes] like seeds. Therefore, even given its arising [causally]from some object to be intended ( pr �aapya), a cognition still has some intentionalfunction ( pr �aapakavy �aap �aara) necessarily to be performed, by doing which the goal isobtained. And that [function] just is the [final stage of the cognitive process, i.e.the] result which is the reliable warrant, because of the exercise of which a cognitionbecomes intentional.50

My translation of Dharmottara’s argument as involving ‘intentionality’

(‘pr �aapakatva’) is, I think, warranted by a couple of points here. The word pr �aapaka

has, first of all, the sense of ‘leading to, conveying, procuring’51—and surely it is not

92 Dan Arnold

unreasonable to think that this semantic range overlaps with the idea of the

directedness or ‘aboutness’ of cognition. More suggestively, note that Dharmottara

here invokes the idea as specifically distinctive of cognition or consciousness; for the

whole point of his counter-example (‘things like sprouts are not intentional even

though their production is invariably concomitant with causes like seeds’) is that

whatever we mean by pr �aapaka is (a) not to be understood as exhaustively explicable

in causal terms, and (b) not to be understood as exemplified by insentient things like

sprouts. What he would thus seem to be proposing, then, is something like a

‘hallmark of the mental’;52 and his whole point here is that this criterion is to be

distinguished particularly from those insentient phenomena that can be exhaustively

described in causal terms. Thus, Dharmottara here argues, in effect, that what

distinguishes our epistemic practices as (in a word) epistemic is the fact of their

involving something more than causally efficacious ‘impingements by the world on a

possessor of sensory capacities’.

On Dharmottara’s reading, then, the point in urging that the word pram �aanEa

primarily denotes the cognitive outputs ( pram �aanEphala) of (say) perception is not, as

it was for Dign�aaga, that only ‘apperception’ (svasamEvitti) is finally indubitable; rather,

the point is the very different one that only judgments count as epistemically useful—

and hence, only judgments count as ‘reliable warrants’ ( pram �aanEas).53 As I have

indicated, though, this is a difficult reading to reconcile with the basic commitments

of the philosophical program initiated by Dign�aaga and Dharmak�iirti, for whom any

propositional content at all would seem to be excluded from the kind of ‘perception’

that they admit as a pram �aanEa. Accordingly, Dharmottara is at pains to make his

point, and it is not clear that he finally succeeds at framing that point as a non-

question-begging alternative to the view he is resisting.

This is particularly clear in the passage that I will now adduce as a bridge to

the view of S�aantaraksEita. Thus, again urging that the idea he has in mind will not

admit of an exhaustively causal description, Dharmottara tries to argue that

the phenomenological content of a perception (e.g. the appearing sense datum ‘blue’)

is causally related to the object perceived—and that the resultant judgment (‘that

is blue’) consists no longer in the bare sensing of immediately present content,

but rather in the recollection of a similarity between the currently sensed object, and

other things like it.54 And what he needs to argue is that while that judgment is

not directly caused by the same thing that causes the bare perception, it is

nevertheless in some sort of relation thereto. The question is: what kind of relation?

Dharmottara:

In this case, the relation between the thing known and the way we knowit (s �aadhyas �aadhanabh �aava) is not based on the relation of producedand producer, according to which there would be a contradiction within asingle thing; rather, [these are related] as being intended and intentional(vyavasth �aapyavyavasth �aapakabh �aavena).55

The challenge here, of course, is to understand Dharmottara’s alternative terms

(vyavasth �aapya and vyavasth �aapaka) in such a way as to avoid attributing to him


precisely the sort of contradiction he has here set out to avoid. Whether or not he can

do so, it is clear at least that Dharmottara means to argue that the relation between

these two terms of a perception is to be understood as something other than a causal

relation (something, he says, other than a ‘janya–janaka’ relation)—which is precisely

why, I think, we can read him as again having in mind the relation between the object

intended (vyavasth �aapya), and an intending (vyavasth �aapaka) subject.

Whatever Dharmottara has in mind here, though, the later thinker

MoksE�aakaragupta suggestively adduces precisely the same formulation: ‘With respect

to cognition, the property of knower in relation to what is known is not explained as

being an object–agent [relation]; rather, [it is explained] as being an intended and

intentional [relation] (vyavasth �aapyavyavasth �aapakabh �aavena)’.56 MoksE�aakaragupta,

though, deploys Dharmottara’s formulation in a slightly different context—

specifically, in order to meet precisely the kind of objection leveled at the doctrine

of svasamEvitti by Candrak�iirti: viz. that this doctrine leads to an infinite regress if it is

understood as the claim that a cognition must, in order to count as such, itself be the

object of an additional cognition (one of the ‘svasamEvitti’ type).57

For MoksE�aakaragupta, though, that is not how svasam

Evitti is to be understood;

rather, it is to be understood as characterizing (in the phrase he borrows from

Dharmottara) the relation of ‘intended and intentional’. The point is that this

relation does not—on MoksE�aakaragupta’s reading as on Dharmottara’s—admit of

the kind of agent–action–object analysis that can be brought to bear, he seems to

allow, on any action. Interestingly, though, MoksE�aakaragupta (in characteristically

Sanskritic fashion) argues this point, too, by appeal to essentially grammatical

presuppositions—specifically, presuppositions concerning the adjectival relation of

‘qualification’ (visesEanEa). Thus, he says:

. . . if cognition were not apperceptive, then it would be impossible to say ‘an objectis cognized,’ because of the axiom that ‘a thought by which the qualification hasnot been comprehended does not engage the thing to be qualified’. In this case, anobject is the thing to be qualified; ‘it is cognized’ is the qualification, where‘cognized’ means ‘qualified by cognition’. If cognition were not intrinsically(svayam

E) understood in the form of this idea, then how could it be understood that

an object is qualified by cognition?58

The point, then, would seem to turn simply on the definitions of ‘cognition’ (jn �aana)

and ‘cognized’ (jn �aata). That is (if I understand the passage correctly), if ‘cognized’

(jn �aata) just means ‘qualified by cognition’ (jn �aanena visesEita), then it must, according

to the axiom here cited, already—‘intrinsically’ (svayamE), Moks

E�aakaragupta says59—

be known what the ‘qualifier’ (visesEanEa, i.e. jn �aana) consists in; otherwise, ordinary

expressions involving this qualification (‘an object is cognized’) would be

unintelligible.While the characteristically Sanskritic way of making it here is perhaps not

compellingly self-evident, MoksE�aakaragupta’s point becomes more clear if we attend,

finally, to the key passage that he adduces in between the immediately foregoing

passage, and the phrase borrowed from Dharmottara. It is here, then, that

MoksE�aakaragupta approvingly quotes S�aantaraks

Eita on svasam

Evitti—and the passage

94 Dan Arnold

that he thus adduces as authoritative does indeed represent a compelling rejoinder to

the standard objection to svasamEvitti (hence, to Candrak�iirti’s critique thereof), and a

compelling clarification of the force of MoksE�aakaragupta’s own grammatical argument

against the agent–object–action analysis. Thus, S�aantaraksEita (whom Moks

E�aakaragupta

here quotes) takes svasamEvitti to denote simply the ‘subjective’ aspect that defines

cognition as subjective: ‘Cognition is distinct from insentient forms; it is just this

apperception ( �aatmasamEvitti)60 which is its [cognition’s] not being an insentient

form’.61

That is, ‘apperception’ (svasamEvitti) refers simply to whatever it is in virtue of

which a cognition (vijn �aana) is constitutively to be distinguished from insentient

objects (jadEar �uupa). Turning to S�aantaraks

Eita’s text, though, we find that S�aantaraks

Eita

does not tell us much (beyond the fact of its warranting the word svasamEvitti) about

just what it might be in virtue of which this is so. Indeed, as I indicated at the

beginning, his statements on the subject really amount simply to his stipulating a

definition; all he here says, then, is that what he understands by svasamEvitti is

(we might say) simply the ‘defining feature of cognition’. We do not, I think, get

much help regarding this from consideration of the context in which S�aantaraksEita

says this, though it is important to note that this statement is ventured in the course

of his ‘consideration of external objects’ (bahirarthapar�iiksE�aa)—that is, in chapter 23 of

the TattvasamEgraha, which develops the argument that the characteristically Yog�aac�aara

analysis of our epistemic situation represents the best account of our conventional

intuitions.62

Thus, S�aantaraksEita had argued that ‘cognition does not perceptually cognize

(vij �aan �aati) any external object whatsoever’.63 In this context, the foregoing passage

from S�aantaraksEita is introduced by his commentator Kamalas�iila as answering the

following question: ‘But why do these various conceptions not apply as well in the

case of apperception?’64 The answer, we have already seen S�aantaraksEita say, is that

‘cognition is distinct from insentient forms; it is just this apperception which is its

[cognition’s] not being an insentient form’. Kamalas�iila elaborates: ‘For apperception

is not admitted as being intentional (gr �aahaka); rather, [it is admitted] as intrinsically

(svayamE)—that is, naturally—being itself luminous, like the light in the atmo-

sphere’.65 This claim then raises the question (made explicit by Kamalas�iila): ‘Then

why is it not accepted as being intentional?’66 S�aantaraksEita answers:

Its [cognition’s] apperception [does not exist] as being in an action-agent relation,since the threefoldness of [cognition],67 whose form is partless, does not makesense. Thus, because of its being of the nature of intellect, it makes sense that therebe apperception. But how could there be cognition of something distinct, havingthe nature of an object?68

The point of the first verse of this two-verse response appears to be that if

svasamEvitti referred to some action (to a particular kind of perception that can occur),

it would have to admit of the kind of agent–instrument–object analysis that can (in

the view of the Sanskrit grammarians) be given for any verbal construction; but for

S�aantaraksEita, it simply refers to the constitutively subjective aspect that defines any


cognition as a cognition—with this aspect being, it would seem, distinguished from

those that can be described in strictly causal terms. With the second verse, though, weseem to be rather closer to the thought of Dign�aaga. That is, S�aantaraks

Eita makes the

additional claim that insofar as cognition is constitutively distinct from putativelymaterial objects, it makes more sense (in terms, perhaps, of ontological parsimony)

for the direct objects of cognition to be of the same nature—to be, that is, themselves‘of the nature of intellect’ (bodhar �uupa).69

Once again, it is a vexed question whether the claim thus made is that mentalevents are therefore all that exist, or simply the claim that the direct objects ofcognition must therefore be sense data. Be that as it may, S�aantaraks

Eita here deploys

the point in a way that is not obviously different from Dign�aaga’s appeal tosvasam

Evitti. Particularly S�aantaraks

Eita’s initial response, though—his definition of

svasamEvitti, that is, as simply what it is in virtue of which cognition is distinct from

‘insentient forms’—represents a potentially cogent rejoinder particularly to the

iteration problem. For it makes sense to say that a ‘defining characteristic’ isconstitutively different from any act that may be defined thereby. To the extent, then,

that svasamEvitti is (arguably as by Dign�aaga) thought to denote a special kind of

cognition that can occur (one whose object is other cognitions), it seems we wouldhave to allow (in Sanskritic terms) that it is therefore an action that will admit of the

standard analysis of a semantically complete verbal construction—that (in a morecontemporary idiom) it is therefore an intentional act whose object must be specified.

And the problem is that if it is thought that intentional acts (‘cognitions’) count assuch only in virtue of their being thus intended, there is no way to stop a regress. It is

therefore fitting that the perennially vexed exegetical issues that arise with respect tothe trajectory of Buddhist thought centered on this claim concern the question of

whether or not we are dealing with idealism; for on the ‘Cartesian’ reading of Kant’ssynthetic unity of apperception (the reading arguably advanced by Fichte), too,

Kantian insights are taken in a decidedly idealist direction.But to the extent, however, that svasam

Evitti denotes (as for S�aantaraks

Eita) simply the

defining feature of cognition (as opposed to insentient forms)—the hallmark, that is,

of the ‘mental’—we seem rather closer to the ‘logical condition’ reading of Kant’sdoctrine, particularly as that is elaborated by Strawson. Thus, S�aantaraks

Eita has

suggested that svasamEvitti is simply the criterion for individuating tokens of the type

‘cognition’. And the stronger claim that I am now reconstructing S�aantaraksEita as

suggesting is that, in fact, even one who would deny this turns out necessarily topresuppose it. This is the force of my taking S�aantaraks

Eita to have intuited that this is a

basically transcendental point. That is, it is a condition of the possibility even simplyof identifying what it is that we are talking about that it be identified under adescription such as S�aantaraks

Eita’s;70 for (per Strawson’s reconstruction of Kant) even

denying of cognitions that they are subjective requires first having individuatedthem—and it cannot be cognitions of which one denies this if they are not

individuated as things that are subjective.Of course, S�aantaraks

Eita does not argue in this way,71 and it is not even clear that

this way of reading him is warranted by the two subsequent verses from his text that

96 Dan Arnold

we considered. But the verse quoted from S�aantaraksEita by Moks

E�aakaragupta,

understood particularly in light of Dharmottara’s characteristic revision in the

trajectory of thought initiated by Dign�aaga, recommends the view that S�aantaraksEita

can be taken to have understood svasamEvitti not as exemplifying intentionality—not,

that is, as itself simply another kind of intentional cognition—but as intentionality

itself—that is, as what it is in virtue of which any cognition could count as a

token of that type.72 The reason, then, why Kant could coherently claim that

‘pure apperception’ cannot (as he said) ‘itself be accompanied by any further

representation’—viz. because Kant means to identify simply that fact in virtue of

which any act could count as an act of representing in the first place—can apply as

well to S�aantaraksEita’s idea of svasam

Evitti. Thus, if ‘intentionality’ is the fact that

is picked out by S�aantaraksEita’s definition, the point to be made in response to

the M�aadhyamika critique of svasamEvitti is the deceptively straightforward one that

the fact of intentionality is not itself intentional—and hence, reference to the idea of

svasamEvitti does open up a regress.

That is, insofar as S�aantaraksEita has simply stated the criterion for individuating

tokens of the type cognition, the point is simply that this criterion for thus

individuating these is not individuated by itself—and we cannot, therefore, suppose

(as Candrak�iirti does with respect to Dign�aaga) that svasamEvitti must itself instantiate

an intentional structure; for svasamEvitti is here to be understood simply as the

‘intentionality’ that itself is displayed by any cognition (and hence, that is

presupposed by any act even of denying S�aantaraksEita’s point). And that something

like ‘intentionality’ is what is thus necessarily presupposed is what I have suggested by

considering S�aantaraksEita in light of Dharmottara and Moks

E�aakaragupta. Thus,

Dharmottara emphasized that even specifically perceptual cognitions ( pratyaksEa)

must, if they are to count as ‘reliable warrants’ ( pram �aanEa), yield some judgment—

and the judgment that thus completes an episode of perceptual cognition

as a pram �aanEa is, for Dharmottara (and contra Dign�aaga and Dharmak�iirti), not to

be understood as causally produced by the perceived sense datum (not to be

understood, that is, as exemplifying a janya–janaka relation); rather, it is to be

understood as exemplifying an intentional relation (vyavasth �aapya–vyavasth �aapaka-

bh �aavena).

And this is just the point that MoksE�aakaragupta borrows in introducing

S�aantaraksEita’s definition of svasam

Evitti—a definition that he adduces specifically to

head off precisely the kinds of objections thereto developed by Candrak�iirti. That is,

the reason that svasamEvitti cannot (contra Candrak�iirti) be thought vulnerable to the

iteration problem is that it constitutively involves not causal, but intentional

relations. In the context of this reading, then, S�aantaraksEita’s concise and

underdeveloped statement on svasamEvitti—his claim, that is, that this denotes

simply ‘cognition’s not being an insentient form’—can be reconstructed as the claim

that svasamEvitti denotes not a particular type of (intentional) cognition, but simply

the intentional structure that constitutively characterizes any token of the type

‘cognition’.


Conclusion: Towards Inferentialism in Buddhist Philosophy?

Thus reconstructing S�aantaraksEita’s view gives us, I think, the conceptual tools to

appreciate why the critique of svasamEvitti advanced by Candrak�iirti does not—indeed,

cannot—coherently be thought to undermine S�aantaraksEita’s understanding thereof.

This is because svasamEvitti, on this understanding, cannot itself coherently be

thought to require explanation; for the offering of any explanation will, as itself

involving cognitive acts, necessarily presuppose precisely the point it purports to

explain: viz. the constitutively subjective, intentional character of cognition.

Otherwise, it cannot be cognitions that are being explained.

By thus reframing the debate on svasamEvitti in terms suggested by the

alternative readings of Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’, we are,

I think, in a position to better appreciate several points. Consider, for example,

the debate among Tibetan interpreters of Indian Madhyamaka, as that has been

studied (specifically with respect to this issue) by Paul Williams. Much of that debate,

I noted at the beginning of this essay, concerns the question of whether the

kind of critique characteristically advanced by the M�aadhyamikas Candrak�iirti and

S�aantideva is to be understood (with Tibetan interpreters like Tsong-kha-pa) as

refusing even the conventional validity of this idea—or whether (with Mipham,

as sympathetically understood by Williams) it is to be understood as arguing

only that it is not an ultimately obtaining fact, without denying its conventional

utility.Jay Garfield has recently defended the characteristically venturesome claim that

‘Tsong khapa and [his disciple and commentator] rGyal tshab are dead right, and

Mipham and Williams are dead wrong (both hermeneutically and philosophically)

. . .’.73 Garfield’s parenthetical distinction here is important, and, considered along

with the reconstruction I have here proposed, can help us clarify the issues at stake in

such a way as to appreciate that Garfield’s claim is problematic. Thus, Garfield is

right that it is important to consider the cogency of an interpretation such as

Mipham’s (as with any interpretation of philosophical texts) in terms both of its

exegetical adequacy to the (M�aadhyamika) arguments interpreted, and in terms of its

philosophical adequacy—that is, both in terms of the extent to which it can plausibly

claim to restate (in this case) the arguments of Candrak�iirti and S�aantideva, and the

extent to which the interpretation’s inferential relations with other things we believe

are defensible.In terms of the first point, the matter is not as straightforward as it may initially

seem.74 I have argued elsewhere75 that, as is particularly clear in chapter one of the

Prasannapad �aa, Candrak�iirti means to show that Dign�aaga’s philosophical project

cannot coherently be said to give an account of our epistemic practices as they are

conventionally described—and that it therefore cannot coherently be taken to be

even conventionally valid. Indeed, Candrak�iirti’s whole procedure is simply to argue

that Dign�aaga’s approach depends on its peculiarly technical usage of ordinary terms,

and that his usage therefore cannot make sense of ordinary usage—given which,

Dign�aaga cannot be thought to explain what he says he is explaining. What is

98 Dan Arnold

conventionally true, in other words, is just our conventions, and any technical

redescription thereof is, ipso facto, not conventionally valid.To the extent, then, that Dign�aaga’s category of svasam

Evitti is among the targets of

Candrak�iirti’s critique, it would seem that that we are entitled (with Garfield) to judgeinterpreters such as Mipham to be exegetically inadequate to Candrak�iirti’s thought.

But this conclusion can nevertheless be qualified. For in defending the view thatsvasam

Evitti should be retained as part of our conventionally valid account of the

world, Mipham clearly presupposed S �aantaraksEita’s understanding thereof;76 and we

have seen that Candrak�iirti’s critique does not have any purchase against that view—that (to put the same point less contentiously) it is not S �aantaraks

Eita’s view of

svasamEvitti that Candrak�iirti targets.77 It would be at least defensible, then, to claim

that Candrak�iirti did not mean to deny the conventional reality of svasamEvitti insofar

as one takes something like S �aantaraksEita’s view of it as the one that reflects our

conventional understanding—and insofar, then, as one thus takes Candrak�iirti to

refuse only the version of svasamEvitti that is comparable to the ‘Cartesian’ version of

Kant’s doctrine. This point would, to be sure, depend on the (historically

problematic) claim that though he had only Dign�aaga’s understanding of svasamEvitti

before him, Candrak�iirti nevertheless did not ‘mean’ for his critique thereof to applyas well to the version of the doctrine that would later be developed by S�aantaraks

Eita—

but insofar as Candrak�iirti’s critique clearly does not touch the latter, this neverthelessremains a viable move.

In terms of the philosophical adequacy of this alternative reading of svasamEvitti, I

have already tried to develop (following Strawson on Kant) a sympathetic reading of

the cogent transcendental argument to be made in its defense. We have seen, then, anargument to the effect that if svasam

Evitti picks out simply whatever it is in virtue of

which cognitions are to be distinguished from insentient objects (and I havesuggested, following Dharmottara and Moks

E�aakaragupta, that the criterion thus

identified is intentionality), then one cannot coherently deny its obtaining since onecould only claim to deny this of cognitions if these have already been individuated assuch—and it will not be cognitions of which this is denied if we have not thus

individuated constitutively subjective, intentional acts. That this is a defensiblereading of S�aantaraks

Eita is suggested by the fact that Mipham makes some arguments

that are very close to this.78

I would here like to conclude by briefly suggesting some additional philosophical

points that recommend this reading of svasamEvitti. Here, my argument dovetails, I

think, with the broadly inferentialist case against empiricist foundationalism

developed, in ways that basically follow Kant, by Wilfrid Sellars and (more recently)Robert Brandom.79 Sellars’s influential arguments against the ‘myth of the given’ canbe understood as directed particularly against the kind of representationalist

epistemologies in which Dign�aaga’s svasamEvitti can be said to play a pivotal role. Thus,

we saw that the whole point in Dign�aaga’s taking svasamEvitti as a type of ‘perception’

( pratyaksEa) is to advance the claim that we are immediately acquainted with the

contents of our own mental states—that we can know, without mastery of any prior

concepts and without awareness of the inferential relations of this claim with any


other knowledge, at least that we have cognitions; and the point in taking svasamEvitti

as finally the only really occurrent kind of perception is, in turn, to advance the claim

that this is all that we can finally know with certainty.80 It is, then, fitting that

Dign�aaga’s doctrine of svasamEvitti has affinities with the ‘Cartesian’ reading of Kant’s

‘apperception’; for we here have the virtually Cartesian argument that the only thing

we cannot doubt is the fact that we have some experience.But to understand svasam

Evitti thus is not only to hold a view that (as Candrak�iirti

shows with respect to Dign�aaga) exemplifies the iteration problem; it is also (and

perhaps, in the end, more significantly) to take this putatively foundational sort of

cognition in such a way that it is finally incapable of being involved with what Kant

considered to be objective judgments.81 This is, I think, a useful way to characterize the

problems that are widely understood to follow given the radically sharp distinction

that Dign�aaga and Dharmak�iirti posit between perception and inference.82 That is, if it

is held (with Dign�aaga and Dharmak�iirti) that one’s acquaintance with the contents of

one’s mental states is constitutively non-conceptual; and if, further, it is held (also

with these thinkers) that one’s acquaintance with one’s own mental states is therefore

constitutively ‘unsuitable for association with discourse’83—that, in other words, one

can ‘know’ the contents of one’s mind without any knowledge of the inferential

relations of these with anything else that is known—then one is led inexorably to the

epistemological solipsism that is finally entailed by ‘psychologistic’ conceptions of

logic.84 This is clear if we consider, for example, familiar arguments to the effect that

knowledge even of one’s own mental states necessarily presupposes the attribution of

similar states to others—arguments, that is, to the effect that recognizing the

necessarily mediated character even of our awareness of our own mental states

represents the most compelling basis for a refutation of solipsism.85

If, however, svasamEvitti is taken to identify something like the transcendental unity

of apperception, the case is very different—which is precisely as Kant tried to

emphasize in developing his understanding of the transcendental unity of

apperception. As Kant put it,

the pure form of intuition in time, merely as intuition in general, which contains agiven manifold, is subject to the original unity of consciousness, simply through thenecessary relation of the manifold of the intuition to the one ‘I think’, and sothrough the pure synthesis of understanding which is the a priori underlyingground of the empirical synthesis. Only the original unity is objectively valid; theempirical unity of apperception, upon which we are not here dwelling, and whichbesides is merely derived from the former under given conditions in concreto, hasonly subjective validity. (B140)

It is, though, an interestingly complex question whether the Kantian reading of

svasamEvitti here proposed is finally such that it can be deployed in order to support

constitutively Buddhist doctrines. Recall, in this connection, that Kant emphasized

that we are not warranted in drawing inferences from the transcendental unity of

apperception to any empirically existent locus thereof—and that he criticized

Descartes’s characteristic arguments in this regard as fallacious.86 It is not necessarily

the case, then, that this idea commits one to refusing the constitutively Buddhist

100 Dan Arnold

denial of an �aatman. Nevertheless, there may be a real problem in reconciling

characteristically Buddhist commitments in this regard even with the idea that

experience is constitutively perspectival; for to the extent that Buddhists want to assert

that a ‘person’ is really just a causally continuous series of mental events, and that

such continua are finally independent of the causally continuous series of physical

events that are bodies,87 we must ask what could possibly keep all these mental

continua apart—what, as it were, channels them, such that they can represent distinct

perspectives on the world? And what can they be perspectives on (what can they be

about) if they alone exist?

Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, then, may not presuppose that

empirically applicable criteria of identity can be given for the locus of ‘synthesis’ (that,

in other words, persons consist in the kind of ‘selves’ that Buddhists are constitutively

concerned to refute). To the extent, though, that Kant’s point concerns the

constitutively perspectival character of experience, it nevertheless provides a criterion

for individuating instances of such (viz. as being from different perspectives)—and it

is not clear to me particularly that the Yog�aac�aara stream of Buddhist thought (in the

context of which S�aantaraksEita makes the point we have here considered) is in a

position to do this.

Notes

[1] This paper was fostered partly by an exchange of scholarly work and correspondence with JayGarfield and Charles Goodman, whom I thank for the stimulation. (Cf. Garfield, 2004;Goodman, 2004.) Thanks also to Rick Nance and Rajam Raghunathan for their comments onan earlier draft.

[2] Also referred to as svasamEvedana (from the same verbal root).

[3] Williams’s study (1998) then concerns the question—much debated among Tibetaninterpreters of Indian Madhyamaka—of whether or not these M�aadhyamika critiques weremeant to show that svasam

Evitti is (not only not ultimately, but) not even conventionally valid.

See also the review article by Kapstein (2000).[4] Or we might instead (with important implications) say sapient (cf. Brandom, 2000, p. 2, et

passim). That is, if the ‘intentionality’ picked on this understanding of svasamEvitti is

understood as a particularly semantic phenomenon—as the kind of ‘aboutness’ that isparticularly displayed in judgments—then we are talking about the distinguishing

characteristic of a particularly conceptual sort of awareness. This would, of course, underminethe view (surely held by Dign�aaga) that svasam

Evitti is to be reckoned a kind of perception

(hence, as non-conceptual)—though as I will suggest in concluding, such a view might bephilosophically preferable.

[5] Williams (1998, pp. 19–35); cf. Blumenthal (2004, pp. 220–227).[6] This point cannot, perhaps, be held against Candrak�iirti, who had only Dign�aaga in his sights.

It may, though, count against S�aantideva—or at least against his commentator Prajn�aakaramati,who specifically addresses S�aantaraks

Eita’s understanding of svasam

Evitti, and tries to show that it

does not escape the M�aadhyamika critique. Cf. note 70, below.[7] For these different terms, see Critique of Pure Reason, A108 (‘transcendental unity of

apperception’), B132 (‘pure’ or ‘original apperception’), B157 (‘synthetic original unity ofapperception’).

[8] This and the preceding quote from Hume are from his Treatise of Human Nature, Book I,Section VI (Hume, 1978, pp. 252, 255, respectively); the emphasis is mine.


[9] In that case, Kant’s would be a basically Cartesian argument—though as we will note, heclearly meant to emphasize that he did not intend for it to be read thus.

[10] That is, ‘intuition’ (or ‘perception’) involves (to invoke McDowell’s phrase again) simplycausally efficacious ‘impingements by the world on a possessor of sensory capacities’.

[11] That is, the ‘synthesis’ of manifold intuitions represents, for Kant, the point at whichdeliberative freedom becomes possible—with its arguably being the whole point of his entireproject to explain how freedom is possible in a scientifically describable world. It is in thisway that Kant characteristically contrasts ‘receptivity’ (the mode of ‘intuition’) and‘spontaneity’ (the mode of ‘thought’, ‘understanding’, or ‘judgment’).

[12] Specifically, there is an equivocation between ‘I’ as grammatical subject (‘I think’), and ‘I’ asnaming an ontologically distinct substance (‘therefore I am’). Cf. A344, ff. where Kantemphasizes that ‘[s]ince the proposition ‘‘I think’’ (taken problematically) contains the formof each and every judgment of the understanding and accompanies all categories as theirvehicle, it is evident that the inferences from it admit only of a transcendental employment ofthe understanding’ (A348). Husserl similarly argues that Descartes’s argument is problematicprecisely insofar as he compromises its essentially transcendental character—specifically, byintroducing ‘the apparently insignificant but actually fateful change whereby the egobecomes a substantia cogitans . . . and [the] point of departure for inferences according to theprinciple of causality. . .’ (1995, p. 24).

[13] B157. Cf., A117n: ‘. . . it must not be forgotten that the bare representation ‘‘I’’ in relation toall other representations (the collective unity of which it makes possible) is transcendentalconsciousness. Whether this representation is clear (empirical consciousness) or obscure, oreven whether it ever actually occurs, does not here concern us. But the possibility of thelogical form of all knowledge is necessarily conditioned by relation to this apperception as afaculty.’ In this and the preceding passage, Kant makes, inter alia, a point that woulddecisively cut particularly against Dign�aaga’s characteristically foundationalist deployment ofsvasam

Evitti. Thus, we will see that for Dign�aaga, the point in characterizing svasam

Evitti as a

species of ‘perception’ ( pratyaksEa) is to say that the acquaintance we have with our own

mental states is constitutively immediate (that is, non-conceptual, non-discursive). Kanturges precisely the opposite in thus arguing that the content of the transcendental unity ofapperception is ‘a thought, not an intuition’, and that whether it is clear or obscure is of noimportance. Kant’s point finds expression in the 20th century in the work of Wilfrid Sellars,whose influential critique of the ‘myth of the given’ (1963, pp. 127–196) develops the pointthat even our acquaintance with our own mental states necessarily presupposes mastery ofsome concepts, etc. More on this point when we turn to Dign�aaga.

[14] Cf. Brandom’s comment that the course of philosophy changed significantly with the‘replacement of concern with Cartesian certainty by concern with Kantian necessity’ (2000,p. 80; cf. pp. 163–164)—that is, with the replacement of a subjectively epistemic desideratum(‘certainty’) by an arguably objective one.

[15] And in fact, Kant’s doctrine is arguably the precursor to the idea of intentionality as that isdeveloped by thinkers as diverse as Brentano and Husserl, Sellars and Brandom.

[16] Indeed, this is as it must be if language is to be possible at all.[17] Among other things, this greatly complicates our picture of causally efficacious ‘svalaks

EanEas’

as what precipitates perceptual cognitions; for it is difficult to retain the view that perceptualcognitions alone are causally explicable if svalaks

EanEas are really something like ‘sense-data’—

given which, the grounds for distinguishing these from inferential cognitions become lessobvious. Consider, in this regard, Sara McClintock’s (2003, pp. 143–4) helpful statementthat, for S�aantaraks

Eita, sense data ‘are still causally produced, and as such they are still formed

and restricted by their causes. Even though an image of a patch of blue does not arise from agroup of causally functioning external blue particulars, it does arise from a causallyfunctioning internal particular, namely an imprint for the arisal of an image of a patch ofblue. The arisal of images in perception is thus not an arbitrary affair (and to that degree it is

102 Dan Arnold

real); rather, it is rooted in karmic imprints and ignorance.’ But of course, moments ofinferential awareness presumably could similarly be described as caused by ‘an imprint forthe arisal’ of such—in which case, perception would seem to lose its distinctive status.

[18] The Sanskrit (as given in Hattori, 1968, note 1.55, p. 97) is: savy �aap �aaraprat�iitatv �aat pram �aanEamE

phalam eva sat.[19] Tibetan at ibid., p. 183: ’di la phyi rol pa rnams kyi bzhin du tshad ma las ’bras bu don gzhan

du gyur ba ni med kyi, ’bras bur gyur ba’i shes pa de nyid yul gyi rnam pa can du skyes pa dang,bya ba dang bcas par rtog pa de nye bar blangs nas, tshad ma nyid du ’dogs pa ste, bya ba medpar yang yin no. My translation is adapted from that of Hattori (ibid., p. 28).

[20] Indeed, as Dign�aaga argues in his �AAlambanapar�iiksE�aa, cognition must be explicable without

reference to any external objects, must be taken to have other mental events as its directobjects; for (as he argues there) any account of external objects necessarily presupposes someversion of minimal part atomism, which Dign�aaga argues cannot coherently be adduced toexplain our cognition of macro-objects.

[21] Tibetan at Hattori, op. cit., p. 183: yul gyi snang ba nyid de ’di’i / tshad ma . . . ; cf. Hattori’stranslation, p. 29. Dharmak�iirti makes the same point at Ny �aayabindu 1.20: arthas �aar �uupyamasya pram �aan

Eam (Malvania, 1971, p. 81).

[22] Tibetan at Hattori, op. cit., p. 183: de ltar rnam pa du ma rig pa’i shes pa nye bar blangs pa delta de ltar tshad ma dang gzhal bya nyid du nye bar ’dogs pa yin te . . . ; here, the translation isthat of Hattori, ibid., p. 29 (though I have rendered the Tibetan equivalent of upacaryate as‘figuratively’ rather than, with Hattori, ‘metaphorically’).

[23] Pram �aanEasamuccaya 1.10. The Sanskrit (per Hattori, ibid., note 1.67, p. 107) is: yad �aabh �aasam

Eprameyam

Etat pram �aan

Eaphalate punah

E/ gr �aahak �aak �aarasam

Evitt�ii trayam n �aatah

EprEthak kr

Etam; cf.,

Hattori’s translation, ibid., p. 29.[24] Tibetan at Hattori, ibid., p. 183: shes pa ni gnyis su snang bar skyes te, rang gi snang ba dang

yul gyi snang ba’o. snang ba de gnyis la gang rang rig pa de ni ’bras bur ’gyur ro; cf. Hattori’stranslation, ibid., p. 28.

[25] Cf. note 18, above.[26] At Pram �aan

Easamuccaya 1.1.

[27] Hayes (1988, p. 136). Brentano (1973, p. 91) makes almost precisely the same point, in termswith striking affinities with Dign�aaga: ‘. . . besides the fact that it has a special object, innerperception possesses another distinguishing characteristic: its immediate, infallible self-evidence. Of all the types of knowledge of the objects of experience, inner perception alonepossesses this characteristic. Consequently, when we say that mental phenomena are thosewhich are apprehended by means of inner perception, we say that their perception isimmediately evident. Moreover, inner perception is not merely the only kind of perceptionwhich is immediately evident; it is really the only perception in the strict sense of the word. . . [for] the phenomena of the so-called external perception cannot be proved true and realeven by means of indirect demonstration. For this reason, anyone who in good faith hastaken them for what they seem to be is being misled by the manner in which the phenomenaare connected. Therefore, strictly speaking, so-called external perception is not perception.Mental phenomena, therefore, may be described as the only phenomena of which perceptionin the strict sense of the word is possible.’

[28] As much is conceded by MoksE�aakaragupta, who anticipates an objection to this effect: ‘But if

all cognitions are [instances of the kind of] perception that is apperception, [then] howwould conceptual cognitions like ‘‘this is a jar’’ not be non-conceptual, and how would the[mistaken] cognition of a yellow conch shell not be non-erroneous? We reply: evenconceptual cognition is non-conceptual with respect to itself; [such cognition] conceptua-lizes the external object with [propositions like] ‘‘this is a jar’’, but [it does] not[conceptualize] itself.’ (Singh (1985, p. 24): nanu sarvajn �aan �aan �aam

Esvasam

Evedanapratyaks

Eatve

ghatEo ‘yam ity �aadivikalpajn �aanasya nirvikalpakatvam

E, p�iitasan

Ekh �aadijn �aanasya-abhr �aantatvam

Eca

katham na bhavet? ucyate: vikalpajn �aanam api sv �aatmani nirvikalpam eva / ghatEo ‘yam ity anena


b �aahyam eva-arthamE

vikalpayati, na tv �aatm �aanam.) This conclusion surely follows fromDign�aaga’s initial contention that our various cognitive instruments ( pram �aan

Ea) are only

‘figuratively’ so called, insofar as there is finally only the fact of occurrent cognitions havingvarious phenomenological aspects.

[29] It is helpful, in understanding Dign�aaga’s argument, to remain mindful of what is finally atstake for him—to remain mindful, that is, of the basically Buddhist point (viz. an �aatmav �aada)that is ultimately advanced by this epistemology; thus, Dign�aaga’s is the view that what isfinally warranted by the kind of cognition that is uniquely in contact with really existentphenomena is only the conclusion that there are sensations—which does not also warrant theinferential belief that these must be the states of a ‘self ’.

[30] This seems to be the view of Hattori; cf. inter alia, his notes1.65, 1.67 (p. 107). Alex Waymanhas long opposed the ‘idealist’ reading of this and cognate schools. In an article specificallyaddressing the relations between Dign�aaga and the Yog�aac�aara school, for example, Waymanwrites: ‘. . . if indeed the Yog�aac�aara school denies the reality of an external object, it wouldhardly be possible to find its position attractive to the Buddhist logicians who were to follow,since Dign�aaga and his successors . . . do not deny an external object; rather they call it asvalaks

EanEa (the ‘‘particular’’) and even sometimes describe it as param �aartha-sat (‘‘absolute

existence’’), to underscore the reality of this object of direct perception ( pratyaksEa)’ (1979,

p. 65). It should be clear, though, that none of these points self-evidently counts in favor ofWayman’s conclusions; for being ‘absolutely existent’ and uniquely ‘particular’ can just aswell describe sensations as external objects.

[31] Here, my terms are those of Pram �aanEasamuccaya 1.10; cf., note 23, above.

[32] And this claim, of course, is neutral with respect to the question of what might finally exist inthe world.

[33] This is the question that, I have noted, MoksE�aakaragupta tried to address (cf., note 28,

above)—though it seems that MoksE�aakaragupta’s expression simply states what the problem is,

rather than resolving the tension; for the concession that ‘even conceptual cognition is non-conceptual with respect to itself ’ does not make clear what is gained by identifying that fact.

[34] Consider, in this regard, Frege’s notion of ‘objectivity’ as consisting only in the kind ofintersubjective availability that is a hallmark of language, which thus stands in contrast to theeminently private and subjective status of ‘representations’. ‘It is in this way’, Frege thereforesaid, ‘that I understand objective to mean what is independent of our sensation, intuitionand imagination, and of all construction of mental pictures out of memories of earliersensations, but not what is independent of reason; for to undertake to say what things arelike independent of reason, would be as much as to judge without judging, or to wash the furwithout wetting it’ (Frege, 1959, sect. 26). Cf. Wolfgang Carl’s characterization (1994, pp.192–193) of Frege’s critique of the empiricist version of ‘psychologism’: ‘If empiricalknowledge includes or is even based on perceptual knowledge and if sense perceptionrequires sensations, then there can be no empirical knowledge without something subjective. . . . [Thus, Frege] considers the judgment component of empirical knowledge as the realsource or manifestation of its objectivity.’

[35] On the former (idealist) reading, this is because if any cognition, in order to count as such,must have separable ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects, then either one of these aspects, as aseparable component of cognition, can be thought itself to have two such aspects; in thelatter (representationalist) case, this is (more straightforwardly) because if, say, a conceptualthought counts as a cognition only in virtue of one’s non-conceptual awareness of the fact ofhaving it, then it can be thought that the latter awareness, in order to count as such, mustitself be the object of a further such awareness.

[36] I have developed my understanding of Candrak�iirti’s critique of Dign�aaga at length in Arnold(forthcoming, chs 6–7).

[37] That is, that they are not themselves the properties of anything, nor themselves possessed ofany properties—for in either case, we would be left with something that is analytically

104 Dan Arnold

reducible, where Dign�aaga’s project requires that sense data be (as the only ‘ultimatelyexistent’ things) irreducible. Cf. in addition to Arnold (forthcoming), Arnold (2003).

[38] Candrak�iirti had just argued that only a svalaksEanEa that is understood as an object

(karmas �aadhanam) could be knowable ( prameyam). As throughout his engagement withDign�aaga, Candrak�iirti then argues that this requirement cannot be reconciled with ordinaryuses of the word, as exemplified by the expression vijn �aanasvalaks

EanEa (which Candrak�iirti

would read as ‘the defining characteristic of cognition’). This familiar reference to a clearlysubjective/agentive sort of svalaks

EanEa then requires that Dign�aaga must (if his concepts are to

track ordinary usage) allow that svalaksEanEa might also be understood as the ‘instrument’ of

this action (‘characterizing’). This absurdly entails that there are two kinds of svalaksEanEa:

‘one unique particular is warrantable (i.e. because of an object)—the one thus pointed out aswhat is characterized; and one is not warrantable—the one by which something ischaracterized’ (kim

Ecit svalaks

EanEamE

prameyamE

yal laksEyata ity evam

Evyapadisyate, kim

Ecid

aprameyamE

yal laksEyate ’neneti vyapadisyata iti). If the latter, too, is then to count as

knowable, it must at the same time be an object, and an infinite regress looms—which iswhat svasam

Evitti has here been posited to halt. Cf. La Vallee Poussin (1970b, p. 61.3–9).

[39] The reference is to Madhyamak �aavat �aara 6.72–78 (La Vallee Poussin 1970a, pp. 166–174).[40] Recall that Candrak�iirti is here arguing from the view according to which the verbal noun

‘laksEanEa’ (‘characterizing’) is to be analyzed as an action. The claim, then, that a svalaks

EanEa is

‘characterized’ is chiefly to be understood as the claim that it is the object undergoing thisaction (the laks

Eya)—and that it therefore requires some instrument of this action.

[41] La Vallee Poussin (1970b, pp. 61.10–62.3): Atha manyase svasamEvittir asti. Tatah

Esvasam

Evitty �aa grahan

E�aat karmat �aay �aam

Esaty �aam asty eva pramey �aantarbh �aava iti. Ucyate: vistaren

Ea

Madhyamak �aavat �aare svasamEvittinis

Eedh �aat, svalaks

EanEamE[ p. 62] svalaks

EanE�aantaren

Ea laks

Eyate tad

api svasamEvitty �aa iti na yujyate. Api ca, tad api n �aama jn �aanam

Esvalaks

EanEavyatireken

E�aasiddher

asamEbhav �aal laks

Ey �aabh �aave nir �aasrayalaks

EanEapravr

Ettyasam

Ebhav �aat sarvath �aa n �aast�iiti kutah

Esvasam

Evittih

E?

[42] Candrak�iirti adduces the same image in theMadhyamak �aavat �aara; cf. La Vallee Poussin (1970a:pp. 168–169).

[43] La Vallee Poussin (1970b, pp. 62.5–63.2): �AAlambane sati, cittamEutpadyate. Tat kim anyad

�aalambanam anyac cittamE, atha yad ev �aalambanam

Etad eva cittam

E? Yadi t �aavad anyad

�aalambanam anyac cittamE, tad �aa dvicittat �aa bhavis

Eyati. Atha yad ev �aalambanam

Etad eva cittam

E,

tat kathamEcittam

Ecittam

Esamanupasyati? Na ca cittam

Ecittam

Esamanupasyati. Tadyath �aapi

n �aama tay �aa-ev �aasidh �aaray �aa saiv �aasidh �aar �aa na sakyate chettumE. Na tenaiv �aangulyagren

Ea

tadev �aa _nngulyagramE

sakyate sprasEtEum. Evam eva na tenaiva cittena tad eva cittam

Esakyam

Edras

EtEum

E.

[44] Ibid., p. 63.8: Tad evamEn �aasti svasam

Evittis, tadabh �aav �aat kim

Ekena laks

Eyate?

[45] More generally, the possibility being addressed is that of there being any action whose subjectand object are identical.

[46] Consider, too, the conclusion of Candrak�iirti’s critique as that is developed in theMadhyamak �aavat �aara: ‘ Thus, if svasam

Evitti doesn’t exist, then who perceives your paratantra?

Since the agent, object, and action aren’t the same, it’s not suitable to hold that [a cognition]grasps itself.’ (6.76 [La Vallee Poussin (1970a, p. 172)]: de’i phyir rang rig yod pa ma yin na /khyod kyi gzhan dbang gang gis ’dzin par ’gyur / byed po las dang bya ba gcig min pas / de nyidkyis de ’dzin par rigs ma yin // ). As reflected in this verse, Candrak�iirti’s critique in theMadhyamak �aavat �aara is framed particularly against the characteristically Yog�aac�aara doctrineof the ‘three natures’ (trisvabh �aava). To the extent, then, that Yog�aac�aara doctrine typicallyclaims that the paratantra-svabh �aava alone is really existent—and that the ‘perfected’ nature( parinis

Epanna-svabh �aava) consists simply in the paratantra without the ‘imagined’

( parikalpita) fact of its being distinct from one’s subjective perspective thereon—Candrak�iirti wants to know: ‘If the paratantra-svabh �aava exists as empty of both subjectand object, then who is aware of its existence?’ (6.72 [La Vallee Poussin (1970a, p. 166)]: gal


te bzung med ’dzin pa nyid bral zhing / gnyis gyis stong pa’i gzhan dbang dngos yod na / ’di yi

yod par gang gis shes par ’gyur /. . .) This is, I think, basically a question of the same form as

the one that (I indicated above) could be put to Dign�aaga if his account of svasamEvitti is read

as a statement of idealism; cf. note 31, above.

The main thing that Candrak�iirti’s critique in the Madhyamak �aavat �aara adds that is not in the

Prasannapad �aa is a refutation of the memory argument for svasamEvitti (which brings to mind

Kant’s argument contra Hume in the first edition of the Critique). See the bh �aasEya on

Madhyamak �aavat �aara 6.73 (La Vallee Poussin, 1970a, p. 168). Candrak�iirti’s conclusion is that

this argument is circular: ‘Apperception is taken as the proof of memory, while at the same

time memory is used as the proof of reflexive awareness. The argument is circular and

therefore invalid’ [adapted from Huntington (1989, p. 244, note 101)].[47] On Dharmottara as having significantly revised the commitments of Dharmak�iirti, see

Dreyfus (1997, pp. 354–364).[48] That is, in order for a pram �aan

Ea to count as usefully furthering human aims (which is

how Dharmak�iirti defines pram �aanEa at Ny �aayabindu 1.1), it must (as I would put it)

be expressible as the object of some propositional attitude, some ‘that’-clause (‘I believe—

feel, sense, recognize—that . . .’). This is, indeed, among the points of Kant’s contention that

‘It must be possible for the ‘‘I think’’ to accompany all my representations’. It is to this extent

that Lynne Rudder Baker (1987, p. 19) can rightly say: ‘Mental items that cannot be

identified by ‘‘that’’-clauses at all have no claim to being beliefs or other propositional

attitudes’. Dharmottara’s point, then, is that mental items not identifiable by ‘that’-clauses

have no claim to being pram �aanEas.

[49] Here, I am borrowing Dharmak�iirti’s gloss of kalpan �aa (‘conception’) to state precisely what it

is that ‘perception’ ( pratyaksEa) is without; cf. Ny �aayabindu 1.5 (Malvania, 1971, p. 47):

abhil �aapasamEsargayogyapratibh �aasaprat�iitih

Ekalpan �aa (‘Kalpan �aa is a thought whose appearance is

suitable for association with discourse’). The criterion ‘suitable for association with

discourse’ could, I think, be taken as basically co-extensive with the criterion ‘identifiable by

‘that’-clauses’ (note 48, above).[50] Malvania (1971, p. 79) (ad. Ny �aayabindu 1.19): pr �aapakam

Ejn �aanam

Epram �aan

Eam / pr �aapan

Easaktis

ca na keval �aad arth �aavin �aabh �aavitv �aad bhavati / b�iij �aadyavin �aabh �aavino ‘py a _nnkur �aader apr �aapakatv �aat /

tasm �aad pr �aapy �aad arth �aad utpatt �aav apy asya jn �aanasy �aasti kascidavasyakartavyahEpr �aapakavy �aap �aaro,

yena krEten �aarthah

Epr �aapito bhavati. sa eva ca pram �aan

Eaphalam, yadanus

EtEh �aan �aat pr �aapakam

Ebhavati jn �aanam.

[51] Cf. Apte (1992, p. 1130). More basically, the word is the agentive form of the verbal root

pra-ffiffiffi

�aap

p, ‘to obtain’; hence, it refers to whatever is an ‘effector of acquisition’.[52] Which is the role that ‘intentionality’ plays for Brentano and Husserl.[53] The acuteness of the problem for Dharmottara becomes clear especially in the context of

Dharmak�iirti’s commitment to ‘momentariness’ (ksEanEikatva); for on the view that the only

‘real’ existents capable of precipitating a perceptual cognition are radically fleeting moments,

even to take (what are really) different moments in a certain causal ‘continuum’ (samEt �aana)

to be moments of the same thing is already in a sense to have made a ‘judgment’—and

Dharmottara wants to allow that the latter is to be reckoned as part of the ‘pram �aanEa’. Thus,

‘It is a single moment that is to be apprehended by perception, while it is a continuum [of

such moments] that is to be ascertained by a conviction based on perception; and it is

precisely a continuum that is to be intended by perception, since a [single] moment cannot be

intended’ [Malvania (1971, p. 71): pratyaksEasya hi ks

EanEa eko gr �aahyah

E, adhyavaseyas tu

pratyaksEabalotpannena niscayena sam

Et �aana eva; sant �aana eva ca pratyaks

Easya pr �aapan

E�iiyah,

ksEanEasya pr �aapayitum asakyatv �aat].

[54] See Malvania (1971, p. 82.3–6).[55] Malvania (1971, p. 82.7–9): na ca-atra janyajanakabh �aavanibandhanah

Es �aadhyas �aadhanabh �aavo,

yena-ekasmin vastuni virodhahEsy �aat; api tu vyavasth �aapyavyavasth �aapakabh �aavena.

106 Dan Arnold

[56] Singh (1985, p. 23.8–10): atra-ucyate: na karmakartrEbh �aavena vedyavedakatvam

Ejn �aane

varnEyate / kim

Etarhi vyavasth �aapyavhavasth �aapakabh �aavena.

[57] Indeed, the foregoing statement from MoksE�aakaragupta is immediately preceded by an

imagined interlocutor’s appeal to precisely the kinds of examples adduced by Candrak�iirti—such as that a sword cannot cut itself. Cf. Singh (1985, p. 23.3–8).

[58] Singh (1985, p. 23.21–25): Api ca yadi jn �aanamEsvasam

Evedanam

Ena sy �aat, tad �aa ‘‘jn �aato ‘rtha’’ iti

durghatEahEsy �aat, ‘‘n �aagr

Eh�iitavises

EanE�aa buddhir vises

Eye vartate’’ iti ny �aay �aat. Tath �aa hy artho vises

Eyah

E,

jn �aata iti visesEanEamE, jn �aato jn �aanena vises

Eita iti. Jn �aanam

Ecet svayam

Ena bodhar �uupen

Ea prat�iitam

E, tat

kathamEjn �aanena vises

Eito ‘rthah

Eprat�iiyat �aam. Interestingly, the axiom here cited comes from

M�iim�aamEsaka discourse—in particular, from Sabara’s commentary on M�iim �aam

Es �aa S �uutra 1.3.33.

[59] In what amounts, I think, to a gloss of the sva- prefix in the word svasamEvitti. Thus, the word

svasamEvitti on this understanding might be said to refer not to ‘self-reflexive cognition’, but

to what is ‘intrinsically cognition’, or ‘cognition itself ’.[60] The term is used interchangeably with the more common svasam

Evitti (and is used here, no

doubt, for metrical reasons). This term, too, will admit of the range of readings mentioned innote 59, above.

[61] TattvasamEgraha 1999 (Shastri, 1997, p. 478): vijn �aanam

Ejad

Ear �uupebhyo vy �aavr

Ettam upaj �aayate /

iyam ev �aatmasamEvittir asya y �aa-ajad

Ear �uupat �aa //; for Moks

E�aakaragupta’s quotation of this, see

Singh (1985, p. 23.13–14).[62] The passages here considered are repeated by S�aantaraks

Eita in the context of the same

discussion in theMadhyamak �aalamEk �aara; thus, Tattvasam

Egraha verses 1999–2001 occur also as

Madhyamak �aalamEk �aara 16–18 (cf. Ichig �oo, 1989, pp. 194–197; these verses are also translated by

Blumenthal, 2004, p. 237). Again, it is an exegetically complex question whether the‘characteristically Yog�aac�aara analysis’ that is here advanced concerns a chiefly epistemologicalpoint (that sense data are the only direct objects of cognition), or a metaphysical one (thatmental events are all that exist)—though surely the former has a better claim to reflecting a‘conventional’ sense of the matter.

[63] TattvasamEgraha 1998c–d (Shastri, 1997, p. 477): vij �aan �aati na ca jn �aanam

Eb �aahyam artham

Ekathancana.

[64] Shastri (1997, p. 478): nanu ca- �aatmasamEvedane ‘py ete ‘nirbh �aas �aadayo vikalp �aah

Ekasm �aan

na-avataranti? The various conceptions in question (‘without aspect, etc.’) are those deniedin Tattvasam

Egraha 1998a–b. That is, there is no kind of cognition that cognizes an external

object—not ‘one without a phenomenological aspect, or with such an aspect, or with adifferent kind of aspect’ (anirbh �aasam sanirbh �aasam

Eanyanirbh �aasam eva ca).

[65] Ibid.: na hi gr �aahakabh �aavena- �aatmasamEvedanam abhipretam, kim

Etarhi svayam

Eprakr

Ety �aa

prak �aas �aatmatay �aa, nabhastalavartty �aalokavat. The latter is a standard image for talking aboutsvasam

Evitti.

[66] Ibid.: Atha kasm �aad gr �aahyagr �aahakabh �aavena na-isEyate? (literally, ‘as being the grasper of

something to be grasped’).[67] Kamalas�iila glosses: vedyavedakavittibhedena (‘as separate cognized, cognizer, and cogni-

tion’).[68] Tattvasam

Egraha 2000–2001 (Shastri, 1997, p. 478): kriy �aak �aarakabh �aavena na svasam

Evittir asya

tu / ekasya-anamEsar �uupasya trair �uupy �aanupapattitah

E// tad asya bodhar �uupatv �aad yuktam

Et �aavad

svavedanam / parasya tv arthar �uupasya tena samEvedanam katham //.

[69] The argument of verse 2001, then, is similar not only to the basic argument of Dign�aaga’s�AAlambanapar�iiks

E�aa, but also (fittingly, given that Dign�aaga’s own text is in turn dependent on

this) similar to an argument from Vasubandhu’s VimEsatik �aa. Thus, Vasubandhu had argued

that insofar as it is admitted that (a) the karma of sentient beings creates the experiencedworld, and (b) karma is an essentially mental function (cetan �aa, as it is glossed in theAbhidharmakosa), it follows that the more ontologically parsimonious account has it thatwhat is created by karma (viz. experienced ‘things’) is itself mental. Cf. Vim

Esatik �aa 7: ‘It’s

imagined [on the account Vasubandhu is refusing] that the dispositions [originating] from


karma are here, and their result somewhere else; why [is their result] not accepted [as being]precisely where the dispositions are?’ [Levi (1925, p. 5): karman

Eo v �aasan �aany atra phalam

anyatra kalpyate / tatraiva nesEyate yatra v �aasan �aa kim

Enu k �aaran

EamE//].

[70] This is true, at least, to the extent (as Candrak�iirti would emphasize) that S�aantaraksEita can

plausibly claim to have identified the way in which people conventionally understand‘cognition’; and of course, it is S�aantaraks

Eita’s aim in ch. 23 of the Tattvasam

Egraha precisely to

argue that this account represents the best expression of our conventional epistemicpractices. As I noted at the beginning (note 6, above), S�aantideva’s commentatorPrajn�aakaramati had (unlike Candrak�iirti) a vantage point in history that allowed him toexplain how the characteristically M�aadhyamika critique of svasam

Evitti might apply as well to

S�aantaraksEita’s understanding thereof. In this regard, Prajn�aakaramati’s most significant point

is simply to deny that S�aantaraksEita’s definition reflects the conventional use of the word.

Thus, having quoted TattvasamEgraha 1999–2000 (Vaidya, 1988, p. 196), Prajn�aakaramati says

of S�aantideva’s critique (which is precisely like that of Candrak�iirti): ‘The refutation wasexplained having understood the meaning of the word that is well known in ordinary usage,[i.e.] as [involving] separate action and agent, since that is the meaning expressed by theword svasam

Evedana. But if, because of fearing faults [in your argument], even the meaning

of words that is familiar to everyone is abandoned, then you will be in contradiction witheverybody’ [Vaidya (1988, p. 196): kriy �aak �aarakabhedena vyavah �aaraprasiddham

Esabd �aartham

adhigamya d �uusEanEam uktam, svasam

Evedanasabdasya tadarth �aabhidh �aayakatv �aat. yadi punar

dosEabhay �aal lokaprasiddho ‘pi sabd �aarthah

Eparityajyate, tad �aa lokata eva b �aadh �aa bhavato

bhavisEyati). To be sure, Prajn�aakaramati then proceeds to argue (in characteristically

M�aadhyamika fashion) that even if this definition is admitted, S�aantaraksEita could not succeed

in demonstrating that svasamEvitti obtains ultimately (Ibid.: ittham api na param �aarthatah

Esvasam

Evedanasiddhih

E. . .)—though of course, S�aantaraks

Eita did not claim thus to establish it.

Be that as it may, it is interesting that Prajn�aakaramati here as much as allows that the mostpromising way to refute S�aantaraks

Eita’s point is simply to refuse that people conventionally

understand svasamEvitti as reflected in S�aantaraks

Eita’s stipulated definition.

[71] Though his Tibetan interpreter Mipham does; see Williams (1998, pp. 91–96).[72] The difference here is similar to the difference that Candrak�iirti, in his critique of Dign�aaga,

urges between ‘defining characteristics’ (svalaksEanEa) and adjectival ‘qualification’ (vises

EanEa).

That is, while any instance of the latter qualifies some particular example of the kind inquestion, a ‘defining characteristic’ is, rather, what makes something an example of that kindin the first place. This is why, for Candrak�iirti, it is incoherent to suppose (as Dign�aaga does)that unique particulars could be bare even of their own defining characteristics, and why wemust instead allow that we invariably perceive things under a description. Cf. Arnold(forthcoming, ch. 6).

[73] Garfield (2004, p. 2).[74] It should be said here that I am not a scholar of Mipham, and that I am not therefore

speaking here of the interpretation that I know him to have upheld; rather, I am speakingsimply in terms of the different possibilities that seem to me to be available for finessing theexegetical issues in question. See, though, Williams (1998): passim; and (for Mipham’sinterpretation particularly of Tattvasam

Egraha 1999 /Madhyam

Eak �aalamk �aara 16) Doctor (2004,

pp. 253–269).[75] Arnold (forthcoming, chs 6–7).[76] Cf. Blumenthal (2004, pp. 222–223); Williams (1998, p. 91, et passim).[77] Again, though, this point is harder to make with respect to the similar critique by S�aantideva,

whose commentator Prajn�aakaramati clearly knows the thought of S�aantaraksEita. See, however,

Williams (1998, pp. 85–106); and note 70, above.[78] See especially Williams (1998, pp. 91–96).[79] See, as well, McDowell (1998).[80] Cf. notes 27 and 29, above.

108 Dan Arnold

[81] Cf. B141–142: ‘. . . a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledgeare brought to the objective unity of apperception’.

[82] Dreyfus (1997) recurrently considers issues that follow from this.[83] Cf. note 49, above.[84] Cf. notes 13 and 34, above.[85] Cf. Inter alia, Strawson (1959, p. 98, ff.), for just such an argument. The thrust of Sellars’s

critique of the ‘given’, too, is that even our acquaintance with our own mental statesnecessarily presupposes mastery of some concepts, etc. Cf. Brandom’s characterization ofSellars’s critique: ‘. . . the idea that there could be an autonomous language game, one thatcould be played though one played no other, consisting entirely of noninferential reports (inthe case Sellars is most concerned with . . . even of the current contents of one’s own mind) isa radical mistake’ (2000, p. 49).

[86] Cf. note 12, above.[87] Cf. Inter alia, Franco (1997, pp. 67–132), Hayes (1993), Taber (2003).

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