Testimony

Abstract

This chapter provides a discussion of the epistemology of testimony as it plays out in classical Buddhist accounts of knowledge. The chapter begins by describing the contrast between the (non-Buddhist) Nyāya School’s account of testimony and Dharmakīrti’s (Buddhist) account of testimony. The chapter then proceeds to illuminate various other differences between the Nyāya and Buddhist accounts, focusing principally on the distinction between reductive and nonreductive theories of testimonial knowledge and on the distinction between speaker conditions and hearer conditions for testimonial knowledge. The chapter concludes with a section on the transmission theory of testimony and investigates whether the transmission theory would be supported by classical Buddhist epistemologists.