Source: TW
Kumarila Bhaṭṭa says the Buddhists are rebellious sons who are ashamed that they can never live up to the achievements of their fathers (the Veda) & hence despise them.
वेदमूलत्वं पुनस् ते तुल्य-कक्ष-मूलत्वाक्षमयैव लज्जया च मातापितृ-द्वेषि-दुष्ट-पुत्रवन् नाभ्युपगच्छन्ति c.f - TV, 195
“I am my father’s son” is probably what Kumarila had in mind, because he clearly lists out how most of the core doctrines of the Buddhists come from the Upanishads, and even their virtue signalling like ahimsa, charity, compassion, equanimity comes from older Aryan scripture.
Kumarila Bhatta simply found it funny, because the Buddhists would outwardly claim to hate the Aryan religion but end up adopting the exact same doctrines (like in his time, the idea of Kali Yuga had become popular for Buddhists too).
Also was popular the idea that Buddha was just a position/title, and there had been countless Buddhas before the Buddha himself. Kumarila said this is a funny problem for the Buddhists because as time now passes, their founder also becomes a distant memory, just like the Rishis. So now that the Buddha too is a distant memory, they claim the Buddha’s words are also eternal, but at the same time they claim nothing is eternal :-)
Make up your mind, he says… तेनानित्य-शब्द-वादिनाम् आगम-नित्यत्वानुपपत्तेर् अतीन्द्रिय-विषयस्य, this means.. “There can be no permanent scripture for those who claim that language isn’t permanent” (An attack on non-Mimamsakas since only the Mimamsaka claims the nityatva of language and the eternal word:meaning association).
He gives a very funny story to explain how the Buddhist acts. He says the Buddhist is like a man who went to the father of the girl he liked to ask to marry her, and when her father asked “What’s your gotra?”, the man replied “Yours only, what’s yours is mine!” Brahmins don’t marry in the same gotra, so when the man said they have the same gotra, he ended up ruining his own chances of marrying her. Similarly, as Buddhists keep admitting more and more similarity with Vedic ideas (c.f - Mahayana), they end up damaging their own doctrine.
At the same time, it’s interesting to note that Kumarila considers the Samkhya, Yoga, Panchatra Vaishnava and Pashupata Shaiva schools as veda-bahya (outside the Veda) and on a similar status as the Buddhists as well. This is natural, since Mimamsa was the most Orthodox.
Bhatta had high tolerance for the Vedic religion, considered all shakhas equal & appreciated efforts of Vedic Brahmins to support folk religion & festival, but he hated anyone claiming a different authority than the Shrauta or trying to overrule what the sacrifical religion says.
In general, he says the barbarians (Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Persians) maybe good in secular fields such as housebuilding, armor making, but they are capable of any depravity known to man, and there is no bottom line to which their degeneracy might fall. Those are the exact words he uses too, I’m not paraphrasing.