Kumarila

In Indian philosophy, one of the two
great seventh-century commentators of
the Mimamsa philosophy, one of the six
schools of Hindu philosophy; the other
great commentator was Prabhakara.
The Mimamsa school was most concerned with the examination and pursuit of dharma (“righteous action”), for
which members believed all necessary
instructions were contained in the
Vedas, the oldest Hindu religious texts.
Consequently, much of Mimamsa
thought is concerned with principles
and methods of textual interpretation to
uncover and interpret the Vedic instructions. Although both Kumarila and
Prabhakara were committed to discovering the boundaries of dharma by
interpreting the Vedas, there are significant differences in their philosophical
positions, which show up most clearly in
their theories of error.
Prabhakara begins with the assumption, similar to the Nyaya concept of
inherence (samavaya), that there is a
relatively weak correspondence
between an object and its attributes. An
example of this would be the relation of
the color red to a particular ball, such
that the ball is said to be red. According
to Prabhakara, false beliefs result from
akhyati (“nondiscrimination”). This
occurs when a person observes two different things with the same attributes
and concludes that they are the same.
Kumarila is closer to the bhedabhada
(“identity and difference”) philosophical
position, which holds that all things
have both identity and difference with
all other things. Kumarila explains error
as viparitakhyati (“contrary perception”), in which one mistakenly pairs up
the similarities between two things,
rather than noting their differences. For
example, a person mistakenly believes
that a shell with a silvery color is actually a piece of silver because he or she
chooses to focus on the similarities
between the shell and silver rather than
the differences. People are impelled to
make these choices by karmic formations, such as greed for silver.