PVSV and Manorathanandin's commentarY on PV. Occasional insights into how to construe Dharmakirti 's prose have been provided by the translation of PVSV into Tibetan by an anonymous translator and the translation of PV into Tibetan by Subhutigrig~mti and Dge

The Pram6na-vdrttika (hereafter PV) was the most extensive and ambitious work on epistemology to be written by Dharmakirti (ft. 7th centurY C.E.). It is a verse work divided into four chapters, to only one of which did the author write his own commentarY (svavrtti) in prose. The subject matter of the Pram~na-v~rttika-svavrtti (hereafter PVSV) is the process of drawing inferences (anum~na) for one's own benefit (sv~rtha), that is, for the sake of increasing one's own knowledge. The entire PVSV comprises 340 k~rik~ verses, excluding the two benedictive verses at the very beginning of the chapter, along with a succinct prose commentarY to each. The current work presents a study of Dharmakirti 's commentarY on just the first ten of those verses. Since these first ten verses contain so much of the foundation upon which the rest of Dharmakirti 's work is built, we have felt it suitable to present them at this time and then to present studies of further sections of the PVSV in subsequent publications. Dharmakirti 's style is so terse that it is not always immediately clear what philosophical points he intends to make. Therefore, we have found it necessarY to offer a rather extensive commentarY of our own. Much, but by no means all, of what is contained in our commentarY is based on explanations found in Karnakagomin's commentarY on PVSV and Manorathanandin's commentarY on PV. Occasional insights into how to construe Dharmakirti 's prose have been provided by the translation of PVSV into Tibetan by an anonymous translator and the translation of PV into Tibetan by Subhutigrig~mti and Dge ba'i blo gros; such insights from the Tibetan translations as we have found instructive have also been included in our notes. Since our own interpretation of the issues in the PVSV is outlined in our commentarY, we shall confine our comments here to a brief