Since the early 20th century, scholars from diverse cultural regions such as Japan, India, Russia and Austria have studied and translated texts of the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition. They have focused particularly on the philosophical arguments developed within this tradition, which was primarily concerned with the nature and the processes of cognition. In the light of one hundred years of translations, this lecture discusses a cluster of terms related to cognition in the Sanskrit texts by Dharmakīrti (ca. 550–650 CE). These terms form part of a discourse that extends beyond logic to encompass a broader discourse in which Dharmakīrti shapes philosophical arguments in response to the doctrinal debate of his time, articulating a Buddhist philosophy of religion. This lecture will consider how the interplay between the interpretation of philosophical texts and their linguistic translation effectively renders translation a chimera – a process rather than a result. The negotiation involved in this process reveals grey areas in our understanding of the text, the limits of the target language, and a need to create new ways of using it. Furthermore, the patient exercise of going beyond the boundaries of one’s own culture and bringing the foreign into it poses the question of which text is being translated and to which network it belongs today.

Cristina Pecchia is a research fellow at the University of Vienna. She is a philologist working primarily with Sanskrit texts, and specializes in Indian Buddhist epistemology, the intellectual history of Ayurveda, and the history of philology in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, and other institutions. Her publications include the monograph Dharmakīrti on the Cessation of Suffering (Brill 2015) and the co-edited volume Mārga. Paths to Liberation in South Asian Buddhist Traditions (VÖAW 2020). Her most recent article, “Ayurveda and Philosophy”, is part of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine (2025).