Kumārila Bhaṭṭa

Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (fl. 7th century) was the most influential philosopher of the Mīmāṃsā school and one of the great polemicists of Indian philosophy. In a series of massive verse and prose commentaries on Śabara’s commentary on the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras — the Ślokavārttika (on epistemology and metaphysics, in some 3,500 verses), the Tantravārttika and the Ṭupṭīkā — he transformed the technical discipline of Vedic interpretation into a comprehensive philosophy, and used it to attack Buddhism at the height of its intellectual power. His followers formed the Bhāṭṭa school of Mīmāṃsā, whose epistemology was later adopted by Advaita Vedānta.

Life and legend

Little is reliably known. Tradition makes him a Brahmin from the east (Mithilā or Assam), a contemporary of the Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti and the predecessor of Ādi Śaṅkara. Hagiographies of Śaṅkara tell that Kumārila studied in disguise under Buddhist teachers to learn their doctrines; that when they mocked the Veda he could not hold back his tears, was discovered and thrown from a tower; that he survived because of his faith — but lost an eye because he had cried “If the Vedas are authoritative, may I live”; and that, at the end of his life, as penance for deceiving his teachers and for having questioned God, he immolated himself in a slow fire of rice husks, where Śaṅkara found him and sought a debate. These are legends; they show how decisive his campaign against Buddhism was felt to be.

Philosophy

Kumārila defended a realist picture of the world against Buddhist idealism and momentariness: external objects exist; universals and particulars are both real and both perceived; things endure through time; the self is a real, conscious, enduring substance. He argued for intrinsic validity (svataḥ prāmāṇya) — every cognition is valid by its own nature, and doubt requires a reason — and accepted six means of knowledge, adding postulation and non-perception to Nyāya’s four.

He argued that the Veda, being authorless, is free of all defects; that the relation between word and meaning is eternal; and that dharma can be known only through Vedic injunction. Against the Buddhists and Jains, he denied that any human — even the Buddha or a Jina — can be omniscient, and so be a reliable source of knowledge about dharma: no one can perceive the supersensible.

Against Nyāya, he rejected a creator God. If God created the world, who was there to witness it? Why would a God without desires create anything? If out of compassion, why create a world full of suffering? If according to karma, then karma does the work and God is redundant. His arguments became the standard Mīmāṃsā case against theism.

His theory of error — that in mistaking mother-of-pearl for silver, real elements are wrongly combined — and his account of how sentences convey meaning (the meanings of individual words are grasped first and then combined, abhihitānvayavāda, against Prabhākara’s view that words convey meaning only in a sentence, anvitābhidhānavāda) shaped later Indian philosophy of language.

Legacy

Kumārila’s school dominated Mīmāṃsā, and Advaita Vedānta — through Śaṅkara’s successors — adopted his epistemology to explain the world of ordinary experience. His campaign is often credited, along with Śaṅkara’s, with the intellectual decline of Buddhism in India, though historians emphasise many other causes.