Book Review: "Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇaviniścaya, Chapter 3.," Critically edited by Pascale Hugon and Toru Tomabechi , with a preface by Tom J. F. Tillemans.
This critical edition of a major work by the influential Buddhist epistemologist Dharmakīrti (c. 600‐60 CE) is the eighth volume in one of the most exciting and important publication series in contemporary Buddhist studies. Achieving results that are as impressive diplomatically as they are philologically, founding editors Lhagpa Phuntshogs and Ernst Steinkellner have since 2005 been publishing central but hitherto unattested Sanskrit Buddhist texts recovered in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. Previous volumes in the series include Steinkellner's critical edition of chapters one and two of the same text; now having critically edited the final chapter of the same text (which concerns parārthānumāna, or logic and dialectics), Hugon and Tomabechi are to be commended for finishing the task of making available a complete and reliable text of Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇaviniścaya. The present edition follows the editorial conventions of Steinkellner's edition of the first two chapters, and that volume's introduction should be consulted to complement Hugon and Tomabechi's introduction. The latter provides additional details on the manuscript evidence for this edition, and also on the extensive editorial conventions. These do not always make for the most user friendly text, the margins and devanāgarī text sometimes appearing cluttered by the many different subscript and superscript letters, numbers, and symbols keyed to the various parts of the critical apparatus. Insofar, however, as that apparatus provides (inter alia) invaluable cross‐references to the vast body of pramāṇaśāstra literature in which quotations from and parallels to this text can be found, it is finally hard to fault any aspect of this impressive and important philological achievement.
