The taste of the mango: a Jaina-Buddhist controversy on evidence

In the classical framework of Indian philosophy, the different schools of thought agree on the fact that the correctness of an inference relies on a special necessary relation standing between the evidence-property and the target-property. The aim of this paper is to give a presentation of these discrepancies between the Jain and the Buddhist theories of inference, as they are found in Māṇikyanandi’s Parīkṣāmukham, the Introduction to Philosophical Investigation, a digest of Akalaṅka’s mature philosophy on one side, and in Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti, his Auto-commentary on the Essay on Knowledge on the other side.In the classical framework of Indian philosophy, the different schools of thought agree on the fact that the correctness of an inference relies on a special necessary relation standing between the evidence-property and the target-property. The aim of this paper is to give a presentation of these discrepancies between the Jain and the Buddhist theories of inference, as they are found in Māṇikyanandi’s Parīkṣāmukham, the Introduction to Philosophical Investigation, a digest of Akalaṅka’s mature philosophy on one side, and in Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti, his Auto-commentary on the Essay on Knowledge on the other side.A