KUMARILA

flourished AD 730 also called Kumarilla-bhatta South Indian dialectician, teacher, and interpreter of Jaimini's Mimamsa-sutras (The Profound-Thought Sutras), or Purva-mimamsa system (200 BC). Tradition says that as a youth Kumarila was converted to Buddhism, but he returned to Hinduism and became a great defender of Vedic philosophy and practices, especially stressing the requirement of moksha (ritual sacrifice for liberation from the cycles of birth and reincarnation). Kumarila publicly debated Jaina and Buddhist teachers throughout India on the issue of the immortality of the individual soul and tried to persuade the powerful to withdraw their patronage of Buddhist monasteries. He hoped, through his revival of Hinduism, to weaken and stop the spread of those two religions in South India. A number of his ideas were taken up by his younger contemporary Sankara. Kumarila added an epistemological element to the Mimamsa collection of aphorisms, ritual, and inheritance law. Kumarila and his contemporary (and possibly disciple) Prabhakara are the chief exponents of the tenets found in the Mimamsa-sutras. Of these two interpretations, Kumarila's is the more widely read, and it is considered the chief source for the study of this philosophy.