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.