A team of computational linguists and Sanskrit scholars has announced a major breakthrough in the restoration of a 7th-century manuscript of Dignaga’s Pramana-Samuccaya. Found in the archives of a remote Tibetan monastery, the manuscript was a palimpsest where the original Sanskrit text had been overwritten with later Tibetan translations. Using hyperspectral imaging and a new AI model trained on Buddhist logical structures, the team has successfully isolated the underlying Sanskrit characters.
The restored sections contain previously lost commentaries on the nature of perception and inference, filling a centuries-old gap in the history of Indian epistemology. This discovery provides the first direct look at the early evolution of the Yogacara-Sautrantika school, offering a missing link between the foundational texts of Dignaga and the later developments by Dharmakirti.