One of the two major seventh-century commentators of the Purva Mimamsa school, one of the six schools of ancient Hindu philosophy; Kumarila was the other famous commentator.
The Mimamsa school was particularly concerned with the
investigation and pursuit of dharma ("good deed").
The Mimamsa school felt that the Vedas, the earliest Hindu
religious books, contained all required precepts.
Much of Mimamsa thinking is focused with textual
interpretation principles and methodologies in order to find and understand
these teachings.
Despite the fact that both Kumarila and Prabhakara were
devoted to expanding the borders of dharma through reading the Vedas, there are
significant philosophical disagreements between them, most notably in their
views of mistake.
Prabhakara believes in a notion comparable to the Nyaya idea
of inher ence (samavaya), which is a weak relational force that is considered
to link things and their attributes—for example, connecting the color red with
a specific ball, making the ball red.
As a result of this assumption, he labels mistake as akhyati
("nondiscrimination"), or the inability to draw clear differences.
A person may, for example, misinterpret the silvery flash of
a sea shell for a chunk of silver.
The individual, according to Prabhakara, makes a mistake by
linking two basic judgments: "that thing is silvery" and "silver
is silvery." Both of these assertions are correct on their own; what is
incorrect is their integration into the complicated judgment "that thing
is silver." Kumarila is more in line with the bhedabhada ("identity
and difference") philosophical stance, which believes that everything
identifies with and differs from everything else.
Kumarila defines error as viparitakhyati, or the incorrect
pairing of two objects' similarities rather than the inability to see their
differences.
