While attending a class last semester on lyric poetry, our professor repeated a singular phrase without much obvious context. “Pratyaksha kalpanapodham.” He said, “Perception is without conceptual construction.” While we did not discuss it further, the phrase stayed with me.
As I prepared my summer reading list, the phrase refused to leave me. Some browsing led me to Masaki Hattori’s translation of the first chapter of Dignāga’s “Pramāṇasamuccaya”, titled “On Perception”. While it was clear that I, educated in a Catholic convent school in post-colonial India, was not going to magically start reading philosophy in Sanskrit, my experience with the text stretched beyond what I had imagined.
I was not the only one haunted by the phrase. It had echoed through corridors of monasteries long before Dignāga’s name was known. The original Sanskrit is considered lost; the text survived only through Tibetan translations, fragments, and commentaries. It is a fascinating story, too long to render here, but one thing was clear: the book in my hands was the culmination of a rescue effort spanning eons.
Sitting at my study table, I could not shake the feeling of immense privilege. It was perhaps for the first time in its history that the book was available beyond the confines of monasteries and ritual hierarchies. Under the yellow glow of my reading lamp, I poured over the book. Its light fell softly across the serene Buddha statue beside me; this serenity, however, was not shared. Against my growing frustration, the Buddha’s mien almost seemed knowing. Dignāga’s writing was terse and assertive, but to me it seemed confusing and contradictory. There seemed to be many Dignāgas — the subjective idealist, the phenomenalist, and sometimes Dignāga the Kantian. This was a riddle that I, a student of Western philosophy, could not solve. He refused to reside within categories cast in Königsberg.
I had approached Dignāga expecting a homecoming — after a long voyage westward, returning to read a philosopher of my own land. But to read Dignāga I had to steady myself by Western conceptual handrails which under the weight of “pratyaksha kalpanapodham” seemed to simply melt away. As it turned out, Dignāga and I had long stopped sharing a tradition. I could not understand him because I could not imagine a reality beyond the West’s tradition of subjectivity. The triumph of the subject was all I had ever known. Dignāga seemed unimpressed. The subject was a fiction, and so was the language of subjectivity. The ground beneath me felt suddenly less solid.
It is not without reason that Nietzsche insisted on philology as the modern reader’s essential discipline. Hattori’s philological labor, arising from the very demand of translating Dignāga, restored the ground that had vanished beneath my feet. The translator sought not to build Babel atop history’s ruins, but to clear the site so that Dignāga’s thought could re-emerge and find its completion in conversation with us, his readers.
Published October 6, 2026
