ABSTRACT
This chapter scouts something of the case for characterizing the basically empiricist philosophy of the Indian Buddhist philosophers Dignāgaga Dharmakīrti in terms of Sellars’ “Myth of the Given.” It is shown that Sellars’ critique has considerable purchase here, particularly given this Buddhist philosophical tradition’s way of valorizing non-conceptual awareness. Sellars can help us appreciate why a basically empiricist approach was so effective for Buddhist philosophers who ultimately aimed to argue for a kind of idealism; indeed, on a Sellarsian reading, it seems almost inevitable that the psychologistic account of the mental favored by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti leads to idealism. Just insofar as Dignāga and Dharmakīrti held that Sellars’ “logical space of reasons” is finally reducible to causally describable psychological events, their subjectivist orientation becomes inescapable.
