Dharmakīrti on Relations and Persons

In his Examination of Relations (Sambandhaparīkṣā), Dharmakīrti rejects the existence of mind-independent relations. Instead, on his view, all relations are merely conceptual constructs. While this is a significant conclusion on its own, several of Dharmakīrti’s Indian and Tibetan commentators argue that his denial of real relations has far-reaching implications for the ontological status of everything that we generally take to populate the world—both persons and ordinary objects. This paper focuses on the case of persons. After providing an overview of Dharmakīrti’s own view on the status of persons and relations, I show how three of his commentators each rely on rejecting a different kind of relation to rule out the possibility of an autonomous self: Śaṅkaranandana’s argument turns on rejecting an inherence relation, Chomden Reldri’s on an agential relation, and Gyaltsab Darma Rinchen’s on an autonomy relation. I develop an analysis of Gyaltsab’s apparently novel proposal of an autonomy relation, and I argue that, of these three commentators, Gyaltsab’s argument looks the most promising. I conclude by considering how the claims of these commentators may be reconciled with the prima facie incompatible conclusions of Dharmakīrti himself concerning the nature of things.