Dharmakirti
Buddhist · South Asia · 600 to 660
Indian Buddhist logician who worked out how reliable knowledge arises. He argued that only momentary events are real.
What it is
Dharmakirti was an Indian Buddhist philosopher who worked at the great monastic university of Nalanda, probably in the seventh century. He was one of the key scholars of Buddhist epistemology, the study of what counts as valid knowledge, and is linked with the Yogacara and Sautrantika schools.
Little is certain about his life, and the accounts, especially the Tibetan ones, are colourful and unreliable. His writing is the surer ground, above all his longest work, the Pramanavarttika, a commentary on the theory of knowledge that was studied across India and Tibet and is still studied in Tibetan monasteries.
The main ideas
- Two sources of knowledge. He held that there are two valid ways of knowing: perception and inference. Everything else we trust comes through one of these.
- Real things are momentary particulars. What is ultimately real are particular, momentary things with causal power. Universals, such as the kind horse, are mental constructions.
- Causal efficacy as the test. What is real is what can produce effects, and this marks the line between the real and the merely conceptual.
- Concepts by exclusion. Words and concepts work by excluding what a thing is not (the apoha theory), which he developed after Dignaga.
What it looks like in practice
Picture someone who says they know a mango is sweet because they tasted this one, and then asks how they can know that mangoes in general are sweet. Dharmakirti's theory asks what in the experience gives knowledge of a particular and what inference can be trusted to carry it to a general claim. The method is to separate what the senses directly give from what the mind adds, and to ask of every belief which of the two it rests on, so that nothing is accepted merely because it is familiar or because many people repeat it. This is an illustration of the idea, not a quotation.
Books and moments
- The Pramanavarttika is his largest and most important work, on valid knowledge.
- His other treatises on logic and debate are studied alongside it in Tibetan Buddhism.
Questions and criticism
- Are there only particulars? If only momentary particulars are real, it is asked how the order and kinds we find in the world are possible.
- Is inference reliable? His account of inference rests on necessary connections between things, and critics ask how these are known.
- Who was he? His biography is mostly hagiography, so historians have little to go on.
Close neighbours
He built on Dignaga and influenced Hindu logicians who argued with Buddhists. The pages on Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna show other Buddhist answers about what is real.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Philosophies they belong to or are close to
Who they connect to
Influenced by
- Dignaga · Dharmakirti commented on his work and carried his system forward.
- Vasubandhu · Dharmakirti worked in the Yogacara line descending from Vasubandhu.
Other Buddhist thinkers
- Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) · 480 to 400 BCE
- Nagarjuna · 150 to 250
- Asanga · 300 to 370
- Vasubandhu · 350 to 430
- Dignaga · 480 to 540
- Candrakirti · 600 to 650
- Wonhyo · 617 to 686
Sources we used
- Dharmakirti · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
- Dharmakirti · Wikipedia, read on 9 October 2026