Introduction

Epistemological concerns were explicitly central to classical Indian philosophy. This followed naturally from the fact that the avowed goal of most Indian philosophers was liberation (mokṣa), conceived of as the highest good. Such liberation was deemed worth pursuing because worldly life was widely accepted to be inevitably characterized by suffering (duḥkha). The usual philosophical strategy for finding a route to liberation from suffering involved isolating a crucial causal condition for our entanglement in such suffering and seeking to overturn it. The most popular candidate for such a condition was ignorance (avidyā): we are caught in the cycle of suffering due to our ignorance. Accordingly, eliminating our ignorance through the acquisition of knowledge is the way to liberation.

The beginning of the Nyāyasūtra, for example, provides a characteristic statement of the leading idea here:

This soteriological premise, with its implied epistemological optimism about the instrumental relations between knowledge and the attainment of the highest good, then naturally generates a number of more technical epistemological questions. Questions like: What is knowledge? What are its sources? What are its objects? How do we fall into error? These sorts of questions deeply engaged Indian philosophers and the competing theories they developed to answer them gave rise to pramāṇavāda, that is, that part of Indian philosophy concerned with the nature and sources of knowledge.

It is worth remarking, however, that although Indian epistemology has an explicit soteriological motivation, much of the detailed technical literature frequently proceeds in a fashion largely independent of this commitment. This is unsurprising since the instrumental view of knowledge can easily be generalized, and indeed explicitly was so generalized. Thus the Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti (ninth century), although personally firmly committed to the soteriological premise, clearly indicates that it is but a special case of a more general feature about knowledge which should motivate the study of epistemology: ‘The attainment of all human ends is preceded by right knowledge and therefore it is here expounded’ (Nyāyabindu 1.1).

The structure of knowledge according to pramāṇa theory

Classical Indian theory of knowledge is centred around pramāṇa theory.