What if everything you experience—every sight, memory, belief, and identity—were nothing more than a momentary flash shaped by your own mind? What if reality, as you think you know it, were a clever construction built from habits, concepts, and inferences? And what if a 7th-century Buddhist logician had already explained all of this with more precision (and more attitude) than most modern philosophers? This book is an accessible, ironic, and intellectually playful introduction to Dharmakīrti, the brilliant Buddhist thinker whose ideas transformed Indian and Tibetan philosophy. Rather than drowning you in technical Sanskrit or scholastic jargon, it walks you through his world with clarity and humor, showing how his radical insights into perception, language, causation, and the mind still resonate today. You’ll explore how: Perception is raw and nonconceptual—until the mind slaps subtitles on it. Concepts help us survive but almost never show things “as they are.” Words don’t point to real essences; they work by excluding everything else. The self is a flowing stream, not a solid core. Reality is made of fleeting causal events—not stable substances. Clear thinking is not just intellectual hygiene but a path toward freedom. Along the way, you’ll meet Dharmakīrti’s philosophical rivals, the monks who turned his logic into a scholastic art form, and the modern scholars rediscovering his relevance to cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and semantics. A perfect read for anyone curious about Buddhist philosophy, the nature of thought, or the limits of what we can ever claim to know.
