- Lived:
- c. 480–540 CE · born near Kāñcī in the Tamil south of India; taught at Nālandā; died, by tradition, a hermit in Odisha
- Tradition:
- Indian Buddhist; founder of Buddhist logic and epistemology (pramāṇa theory)
- The Big Idea:
- There are exactly two ways of knowing anything — direct perception and inference — and every claim, including scripture, must pass through one of those two gates or be turned away.
- In their words:
- "Perception is free from conceptual construction." (his famous definition, rendered plainly from the Pramāṇasamuccaya)
- If you remember one thing:
- He turned Buddhism's meditation-psychology into a fighting system of logic — and built a framework for testing claims so good that his fiercest enemies had to argue inside it for a thousand years.