Prabhakara

In Indian philosophy, one of the two
great seventh-century commentators in
the Purva Mimamsa school, one of the
six schools of traditional Hindu philosophy; the other great commentator was
Kumarila. The Mimamsa school was
most concerned with the examination
and pursuit of dharma (“righteous
action”), the Mimamsa school believed
all necessary instructions were contained in the Vedas, the oldest Hindu
religious texts. Much of Mimamsa
thought is concerned with principles
and methods for textual interpretation
seeking to uncover and interpret these
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, seen most clearly in their
theories of error.
Prabhakara believes in a concept
similar to the Nyaya concept of inherence (samavaya), a weak relational
force that is assumed to connect objects
and their attributes—for example, connecting the color red with a particular
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Prabhakara
ball, thus making the ball red. This
assumption leads him to characterize
error as akhyati (“nondiscrimination”),
the inability to make sharp distinctions.
For example, a person mistakes the silvery flash of sea shell for a piece of silver.
To Prabhakara, the person errs by
uncritically connecting two simple judgments: “that object is silvery” and “silver
is silvery.” By themselves, both of these
statements are true, what is false is their
combination into the complex judgment “that object is silver.” Kumarila is
closer to the bhedabhada (“identityand-difference”) philosophical position,
which holds that all things both identify
with and differ from all other things.
Kumarila explains error as viparitakhyati,
the mistaken pairing of the similarities
between two things, rather than the
failure to note their differences.