Reconstruction of Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya together with the Vṛtti
Research: Ernst Steinkellner, Horst Lasic
Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya (before mid-6th cent. CE), the basic work of the epistemological tradition of Buddhism, is handed down only in two poor Tibetan translations. This work has been reconstructed on the basis of these translations using the only preserved commentary on Pramāṇasamuccaya, the Pramāṇasamuccayaṭīkā written by Jinendrabuddhi (2nd half of the 8th cent.), and fragments preserved in other works. The reconstruction work also includes arlier efforts to interpret and recover this text, especially by H. Kitagawa, E. Frauwallner, M. Hattori and Muni Jambuvijaya.
The reconstruction of the first chapter, "Instruments of Knowledge and Perception", by Ernst Steinkellner was published online. The philological and philosophical-historical interpretation of the second chapter, "Inference", was taken over by Horst Lasic, the chapters 3, 4 and 6 by Shōryū Katsura (Kyoto). Chapter 5, "The doctrine of concepts (apoha)", was both reconstructed and translated as part of a dissertation by Ole H. Pind (Copenhagen) under the supervision of Ernst Steinkellner; a revised version was published in 2016 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.