A Hindu champion of the Vedas who argued there is no creator God
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa fought hard for the supreme authority of Vedic scripture against Buddhist rivals. Yet the same seventh-century thinker rejected the idea of a supreme deity, reasoning that the Vedas are authorless and that a world with a divine maker and a definite beginning simply does not add up.
Almost nothing about his life is secure. The Tibetan historian Taranatha placed him in South India; a biography of Shankara says he came from the north and debated Buddhists and Jains in the south; others argue for Kamarupa in modern Assam, pointing to his familiarity with silk-making, or for Mithila, where local legend marks a birthplace. He flourished roughly in the seventh century and wrote three subcommentaries on Shabara's commentary on the Mimamsa Sutras, the best known being the Ślokavārttika.
His core move was to formalise the Mimamsa claim that the Vedas have no author, human or divine. Every school, he noted, considers its own scripture correct; a text nobody composed could not be faulted for an author's errors. He also held that any cognition is valid the moment it arises unless later shown false, so knowledge needs no second-order justification. In semantics, his followers, the Bhāṭṭas, held that a sentence's meaning is assembled from separately understood words, a position the philosopher Daniel Arnold likens to Jerry Fodor's. The rival Prabhākara school spent some seven or eight centuries arguing the opposite.
Against Buddhism he deployed pointed arguments. He dismissed Buddhist and Jain scriptures for being composed in vernacular dialects rather than proper Sanskrit, though the scholar Sheldon Pollock notes this shows he did not know the Sanskrit Buddhist works already circulating. He mocked the Sautrantika doctrine of momentariness, since the world plainly does not vanish from moment to moment.
Legend has filled the gaps in his biography. One story sends him to Nalanda to study Buddhism in order to refute it; a Tibetan chronicle makes the Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti his nephew, though John Taber argues Kumārila's picture of Buddhist thought is too simple for him to have faced Dharmakīrti. A fourteenth-century hagiography has Shankara challenging him on his deathbed. His influence spread through Indian philosophy, although the Vedanta school parted from Mimamsa by refusing to rank the Upanishads below the ritual Vedas.
Source: Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
