Dignaga

Dignaga (c.480-540 CE) was the South Indian thinker who founded the Buddhist logic and epistemology (pramana) tradition, bringing rigorous analysis to how the mind knows anything at all. Working within the Yogacara stream, he argued that the only two valid means of knowledge are direct perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anumana), and—crucially—that the particular “object” given in raw perception is bare and momentary, while everything we take to be a stable, nameable thing is a construction added by conceptual mind.

His apoha theory held that general concepts arise not by grasping real universals “out there” but by exclusion—the mind carves up experience, so the world of recognizable objects is substantially mind-built.

For the mind-power lineage, Dignaga sharpens the Yogacara intuition into a precise epistemology of construction: the furniture of our experienced world—objects, categories, identities—is assembled by the perceiving mind rather than simply received from outside.

This is an ancient, rigorous ancestor of the modern claim that reality as we experience it is a mental construction, and that shifting cognition can shift the experienced world. By making perception itself a constructive act, he provides philosophical backbone for “you don’t see things as they are, you see them as you are.” His epistemology was completed by his great successor Dharmakirti and shaped centuries of Buddhist (and comparative) philosophy of mind.