[Buddha-l] Niścaya again

[Richard Hayes]

On Friday 08 December 2006 12:22, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> How about instead of differentiating between know that P and be convinced
> that P, one distinguishes between know that P and know P, the former
> referring to conceptual knowledge and the latter to the special type of
> knowing involved in direct perception of discrete particulars (though P in
> this case would necessarily be nonreducible to linguistic
> conceptualization)? 

I am not sure whether niścaya is used to refer to direct knowledge of 
momentary particulars---I haven't yet had time to look through Ono's 
concordance of every word ever used by Dharmakirti for that information. I do 
know that the term is used a lot with reference to propositional knowledge, 
and that is the context I am now most worried about for my current 
translation project. The terms niścaya and niścita come up around twenty 
times in the first forty verses or their commentaries of the PVSV. Both of 
those words are invariably translated by the Tibetans as nges pa. That 
Tibetan phrase is also used to translated avaśyam, niyata, niyama, 
pratiniyata,

Thanks for your thoughts on this, Dan. There is more to say, and I will say it 
as soon as I dig my way out from under the stack of essays and final exams I 
have to grade, none of which are---alas---on topics in Indian Buddhist 
epistemology.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes