Tantric Epistemology and the Problem of Ineffability in the Seven Siddhi Texts

Abstract

From the early sixth century of the common era to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, two contemporary genres came to dominate Buddhist literature. On the one hand there were the schools of formal logic and epistemology whose textual tradition emerged out of the works of the Buddhist scholar Dignāga and his commentator Dharmakīrti. On the other, there were the esoteric textual traditions that would come to be known as the Buddhist tantras. These two are considered by many to have developed independently, with some scholars even going so far as to characterize the esoteric textual traditions as a protest movement intended to push back against the institutional scholasticism of post-Dignāga epistemological discourse. Relying upon a set of Sanskrit works by seven Indian tantric mahāsiddhas known in Tibetan sources as The Seven Siddhiḥ Texts or Grub pa sde bdun, this paper challenges the idea that the sophisticated esoteric ritual theory and praxis of the Buddhist yoga- and mahāyoga-tantras is necessarily incompatible with or antagonistic toward the Buddhist epistemological tradition by pointing to the basic soteriological issue that both factions held in common: the problem of how, when, and for whom ultimate reality, ineffible by definition, is able to be both perceived and communicated.