Pramāṇavārttika Commentary of?1297 Part One: Preliminary Observations and the Import of its Title

Hitherto little known, Btsun pa Ston gzhon was a thirteenth and early fourteenth century scholar who was active in, among other places, Sa skya monastery, the Yuan capital of Dadu (present-day Beijing), and in his monastery of Gnyan phu in Tshes spongs. He apparently wrote two studies on Buddhist logic and epistemology of which so far only his exegesis of Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika has become available. In this article, I begin a study of the latter work, which, even if it appears to have remained largely unknown to later Tibetan intellectual circles, offers very important insights into Tibetan Dharmakīrti studies of the thirteenth century, the vehement disagreements he had with 'U yug pa Rigs pa'i seng ge (13th c.), his senior fellow Sa skya pa intellectual and the first Tibetan Pramāṇavārttika commentator, and how at-tempts continued to be made in finetuning Sa skya Paṇḍita's Pramāṇavārttika transla-tion. PREAMBLE he existence of what appears to be a rare if not a unique manuscript of a commentary on Dharmakīrti's (ca. 550 or ca. 600-60)1 versified Pramāṇavārttika by the elusive and largely 1 The approximate dates of the Indian Buddhist philosophers whose focus was logic and epistemology (pramāṇa) are taken from E. Steinkellner's and M.T. Much's very useful Texte der erkenntnistheoretischen Schule des Buddhismus, Ab