Sakya Paṇḍita

Sakya Paṇḍita (1182-1251) was among Tibet's most consequential and controversial philosophers, especially in the areas of epistemology and philosophy of language. He retranslated the Pramāṇavārttika of Dharmakīrti with his teacher, the Kashmiri paṇḍita Śākyaśrībhadra, and he helped to establish his home monastery of Sakya as a major center for the study of Buddhist pramāṇa. He became expert in Sanskrit grammar, lexicography, poetics, and metrics, and he advocated for a broad approach to Indic learning for Tibetans of his time. In his famous and influential Treasury of Epistemological Reasoning (Tshad ma ‘rig pa'i gter), Sapaṇ defended the anti-realism of the crucial doctrine of apoha, which explains how erroneous concept formation is grounded in karma. Many critiques of his contemporaries flowed from this nominalist, pragmatic view as well as a consistently austere separation between the two truths of ultimate and conventional reality.