Dharmakīrti on Compassion and Rebirth highlights the religious dimension of Buddhist logic and epistemology by way of individual studies on fundamental and controversial philosophical and religious issues in Dharmakīrti’s notions of com-passion, karma, rebirth, the objects of meditation, the reliability of the Buddha, the four noble truths, the path to enlightenment, and related topics. The book also presents the first attempt to translate large portions of Prajñākaragupta’s commentarial masterpiece, the Pramāṇavārttikālaṅkārabhāṣya. At the occasion of its second edition, the book has been supplemented with a new substantial study which addresses a remarkable theory developed by Prajñākaragupta and called “the doctrine of a future cause” (bhāvikāranavāda). This is a highly original theory of backward causation, or retrocausation, which Prajñākaragupta employs in his proof of rebirth, his explanation of the yogic perception of past and future objects, and his understanding of pervasion (vyāpti) as an essential feature of inference.

Eli Franco is director of the Department of Indology and Central Asian Studies at the University of Leipzig, and a Member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences. His main research area is the history of Indian philosophy with special emphasis on the Buddhist philosophical traditions. Franco has authored a foundational study on skepticism in classical South Asia, particularly in its relation to the materialistic tradition of Lokāyata. Further, he edited and partly reconstructed the “Spitzer Manuscript,” the earliest philosophical Sanskrit manuscript, which goes back to the period of the Kushanas and was discovered by the Third Prussian Turfan expedition in Kizil (Chinese Central Asia). Thanks to a cooperation with the China Tibetology Research Center, Beijing, Franco has been conducting research projects on unique Sanskrit manuscripts of works by the renowned Buddhist philosophers Jitāri and Yamāri that have survived in Tibet.