Dignāga

Brief definition

Dignāga is the founding figure of the Buddhist pramāṇa (epistemology and logic) tradition. His works, especially the Pramāṇasamuccaya, lay out influential theories of perception, inference, and exclusion (apoha), reshaping how Buddhist philosophers think about knowledge and language.

Placement among schools

Doxographically, Dignāga is often associated with a Sautrāntika-influenced perspective, later interpreted by some as compatible with Yogācāra/Cittamātra. In relation to the grid Vaibhāṣika / Sautrāntika / Cittamātra / Madhyamaka:

• He refines Sautrāntika-style concerns about how objects are known, emphasizing that perception apprehends unique particulars while concepts operate through exclusion (apoha).
• His system is then taken up by later figures like Dharmakīrti and integrated (at the conventional level) into Madhyamaka frameworks, especially in Tibetan scholasticism.

Thus Dignāga stands at the beginning of a distinctive Buddhist logical-epistemological current that interacts with Abhidharma, Sautrāntika, Yogācāra, and Madhyamaka without being reducible to any single one of them.