Kumarilla the teacher of adi shankaracharya biography
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Profoundly wary of the significance of self-awareness in Buddhist arguments for idealism—Dharmakīrti’s arguments for the foundational character of self-awareness, for example, amount to a case at least for the kind of epistemic idealism on which the direct objects of awareness are mental representations (see Arnold 2008)—Kumārila was at pains to disallow that awareness is essentially reflexive.
Sheldon Pollock has recurrently argued, in this vein, that the dominance achieved by proponents of the Mīmāṃsaka project is reflected in widespread Indic conceptions of authoritative discourse in general—conceptions such as Kumārila himself advanced with his arguments concerning, e.g., the epistemic status of the vast corpus of Brahmanical literature (generally styled smṛti, “tradition”) that extends beyond the Vedic corpus (contrastively styled śruti, “revelation”).
Thus, Kumārila argued at length in the Tantravārttika (e.g., 1.3.1, ff.) that traditional literature can be accepted as authoritative just insofar as it exhibits the property of “being rooted in the Vedas” (vedamūlatvam)—even if that means, in some cases, inferring the reality of a no-longer-accessible Vedic text as the basis for retaining manifestly important traditions that do not obviously stem from any extant Vedic text.
(On this, see Krasser 1999.) But while Kumārila’s epistemological doctrine is clearly meant to dovetail with these other commitments to secure a unique epistemic status for the Vedas, the claimed eternality of language (and the consequent critique of theism) is not itself a point that is advanced by Kumārila’s epistemological case for the immediately justificatory status of contentful cognitions; indeed, that there is nothing intrinsically anti-theistic about his epistemology is suggested by the fact that William Alston (1991) has elaborated a strikingly similar epistemology precisely in order to show specifically theistic practices to be justified.
He is also credited with the victories over the Jains in the court of the king Sudhanva in Karṇāṭadeśa, in South India. c. It thus becomes clear that arguments for thinking that śabda is eternal will seem rather different depending on which of these senses one takes to be in play. 181–201, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
It is also considered as his best work.
(See McCrea 2000.) So, just insofar as they refer to already-present things, nouns refer to things that are essentially subordinated to the realization (the bhāvanā, or “making real”) of the acts that are what such sentences primarily enjoin; insofar, then, as it is reasonable to think that verbs, too, must have referents, and insofar as these referents are always essentially yet to be realized, Kumārila thinks it necessary to posit apūrva (the temporally remote consequence of ritual acts) as being, as it were, the “referents” of verbs.
Throughout the course of his journey, Shankaracharya discussed his ideas with various other philosophers and fine-tuned his own teachings from time to time. “Being known,” then, is here thought to characterize the objects of such acts, and is therefore not something itself to be known by introspection.
Though his idea of becoming a monk was opposed by his mother, Shankara knew exactly what he had to do. 710; see Uskokov 2022). Against the kind of common-sense realism exemplified by proponents of Mīmāṃsā, these Buddhists were inclined to encourage wariness with regard to our ordinary epistemic intuitions; Buddhists, after all, are chiefly concerned to argue that we are mistaken in inferring (what is perhaps among our most unshakable convictions) that our manifestly episodic cognitions are the states of an underlying self.
4. Kumārila appealed to this mode of reasoning to argue, for example, for the necessity of positing universals as the referents of words; thus, what one understands, on rightly taking the meaning of a word, is that (a universal) without which the word’s communicative capacity would not be intelligible.
The same epistemic procedure is invoked, as well, to offer a peculiar alternative to the characteristically Buddhist view that awareness is inherently reflexive (that all awareness, that is, involves svasaṃvitti, or “self-awareness”).
Mit einem Anhang zur Geschichte der negativen Erkenntnis in der Indischen Philosophie. As per his directions, Śaṅkara is said to have gone to Maṇdana Miśra for the same. Edited by S. K. Ramanatha Sastri, 1971, in Ślokavārtikavyākhyā Tātparyaṭīkā of Uṃveka Bhaṭṭa, Madras: University of Madras, 1971.
The Buddhist claim is less obviously compelling, however, if instead one takes it that śabda denotes always already available conditions of the possibility of any particular utterance’s counting as linguistic.
Still, while it is surely appropriate thus to credit Kumārila’s arguments for the eternality of language with capturing profound insights regarding our linguistic being, the case for his account of the eternality of language is greatly complicated by the fact that Kumārila actually holds, in a way, that it is in both of the foregoing senses of the word that śabda should be understood as eternal; on his view, that is, it is not only linguistic universals that are timeless, but also the phonemes that manifest these.
It is fitting, then, that among the sources for studying Kumārila’s thought should be not only the texts of Mīmāṃsaka commentators on his work—particularly Uṃveka Bhaṭṭa (fl.