Buddhist and Jaina Logic and Epistemology

Buddhist philosophy rejects the Vedic framework of an eternal self (atman) and instead builds its epistemology around momentariness (kshanikavada) and dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), the doctrine that all phenomena arise in causal dependence on other phenomena and possess no fixed, independent essence. This metaphysical starting point produced distinctive schools — Sarvastivada, Sautrantika, Yogachara, and Madhyamaka — each offering a different account of how perception, causation, and language relate to an ultimately empty or constructed reality.

Nagarjuna, the towering figure of Madhyamaka, argued in the Mulamadhyamakakarika that all things are shunya, empty of inherent existence (svabhava), because they arise only in dependence on causes and conditions. His method of prasanga, reducing every metaphysical position — including his opponents' and even his own — to absurdity, produced one of the most radical critiques of essentialism in world philosophy, influencing later Indian and Tibetan thought profoundly.

Buddhist logicians Dignaga and Dharmakirti developed a sophisticated epistemology restricting valid knowledge to two pramanas: perception (pratyaksha) and inference (anumana), explicitly excluding scriptural testimony as an independent source, a direct challenge to Nyaya and Mimamsa. Dharmakirti's theory of apoha explained how words refer to things not through positive universals but through the exclusion of what a thing is not, a nominalist solution to the problem of universals that anticipated later debates in the philosophy of language.

Jaina philosophy contributed anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, holding that reality is complex and can be truly described from multiple, even seemingly contradictory, standpoints (nayas). This was formalised in syadvada, the seven-fold predication scheme that qualifies every assertion with 'in some respect' (syat), offering a logical tool for accommodating partial truths without collapsing into either absolutism or relativism.

The sustained polemics among Buddhist, Jaina, Nyaya, and Mimamsa logicians across a millennium produced remarkably refined tools for analysing fallacies, ambiguity, and the conditions of valid argument. This tradition matters for contemporary scholarship not as historical curiosity but as an underused resource for comparative epistemology and for training students to hold multiple perspectives in productive tension rather than premature synthesis.