Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit For several decades, the Indian intellectual landscape has been plagued by a quiet but profound crisis: a persistent, agonizing lack of civilizational confidence.

In our universities, our public squares, and our literary festivals, we have cultivated a habit of perpetually looking outward for direction, validation, and epistemological frameworks. We intuitively turn to Descartes to understand consciousness, to Kant to comprehend epistemology, and to Hume to study causality. While Western intellectual traditions are undeniably robust and must be rigorously engaged, the tragedy lies in our unspoken assumption that serious philosophical inquiry begins and ends with them.

This outward gaze has rendered us intellectual consumers rather than creators. However, a quiet revolution is now underway, driven by the emergence of the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) as a formal framework for academic and civilizational inquiry. The fundamental premise of IKS is not chauvinism or isolationism. Rather, it is the recognition that India possesses its own vast, internally consistent, and rigorously analytical systems of thought. Reclaiming these systems is the only sure path to liberating the Indian mind from its colonial hangover and reinvigorating our intellectual discourse. We must first know ourselves, stand firmly upon our own philosophical bedrock, and only then engage the West as equals.

To understand the sheer magnitude of what we have forgotten, and what IKS seeks to recover, we need only look at the life, works, and staggering genius of Dharmakirti, the seventh-century Buddhist philosopher and logician. Born in a family in the southern reaches of India, Dharmakirti's intellectual journey eventually led him to the great Mahavihara of Nalanda. He would go on to become one of the most formidable intellects in history, fundamentally reshaping Buddhist philosophy and the broader landscape of Indian epistemology. He represents the pinnacle of an ancient, rigorous logical tradition, completely dismantling the persistent colonial myth that Indian thought was merely “mystical” or “otherworldly.”

Dharmakirti's primary focus was pramanasastra, the science of epistemology, which investigates the valid means of acquiring knowledge. Building upon the foundational work of his predecessor, Dignaga, Dharmakirti authored a monumental body of work, the most celebrated of which is the Pramanavarttika. In this text, and others like the Nyayabindu and the Pramanaviniscaya, he sought to place Buddhist soteriology on a foundation of unassailable logic.

He was fiercely empirical and rational in his thought and philosophy. Dharmakirti posited that there are only two valid means of knowledge: perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anumana). For him, perception was the direct, non-conceptual apprehension of reality, as in the raw data of existence before the mind colors it with language and categorization. Inference, on the other hand, was the logical process by which we understand things we cannot directly perceive. Through these two tools, Dharmakirti built a system that rigorously defended the core Buddhist doctrine of momentariness (ksanikavada), which essentially holds that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux, existing only for a fleeting moment. He also expounded on the absence of a permanent self (anatman).

His contributions went far beyond mere theology, contributing to groundbreaking interventions in the philosophy of language, causality, logic, and perception. He developed the apoha (exclusion) theory of meaning, arguing that words do not refer to universal, eternal essences, but rather function by excluding their opposites. A “cow” is simply that which is “not a non-cow.” This nominalist approach to language prefigures, by over a millennium, the structuralist linguistics of thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure, demonstrating an astonishingly modern grasp of how language constructs reality rather than merely reflecting it.

Yet, what makes Dharmakirti deeply relevant to our current civilizational discourse is not just what he thought, but how he engaged with the world. He was a master of the vada tradition, which was the Indian method of systematic and rule-bound philosophical debate. Dharmakirti also illustrates the larger trend of Bharatiya traditions where knowledge was not a singular onetime contribution but rather a sum of previous efforts. And in this sense, he inherited and perfected the numerous preceding traditions of robust intellectual debate from his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries. His works exemplify this through the intense and granular engagement with rival Hindu orthodox schools, particularly the Nyaya and Mimamsa traditions. He studied their texts, understood their arguments, often better than they did themselves, and formulated devastatingly precise counter-arguments.

The period in which he wrote is also relevant to mention here because it leads to a crucial parallel in the narrative of Indian civilization: the tradition of intellectual engagement, exemplified a century or so later by Adi Shankara. Much like Dharmakirti, Shankara was an itinerant intellectual who traversed the subcontinent, engaging with diverse strands of thought, including the intellectual descendants of Dharmakirti himself. Shankara and Dharmakirti sat on opposite sides of a vast metaphysical divide, in which one championed the ultimate, unchanging reality of consciousness, while the other defended the dynamic, momentary nature of phenomena. Their engagement was not merely polite disagreement; it was a fierce, high-stakes intellectual war. Yet the fact that these orthodox and heterodox schools battled relentlessly for centuries, using syllogisms rather than swords, is the ultimate proof of a profound civilizational ethos. They shared an environment in which iron sharpened iron, contributing significantly to the ideas that still guide Indian philosophical traditions.

Both philosophers adhered strictly to the tradition of purvapaksa, the intellectual requirement to accurately articulate an opponent’s viewpoint before attempting to refute it. They sought truth not through dogmatic assertion or the silencing of dissent, but through the crucible of rigorous, logical debate (shastrartha). This was and continues to be the true hallmark of a confident civilization. It is an environment where ideas flourish and where epistemology is sharpened through friction, and where the ultimate goal is the realization of truth. This forms the very essence of what the IKS framework seeks to revive.