within monism and pluralism, and developed a refined theory of negation as
the key to resolving them. Prabhakara and Kumarila shaped their systems in
different directions over the question of how to incorporate this new material.
Kumarila’s most radical tendency was to build categories of negation, taken
as real entities. Darkness, he said, is not the mere absence of light, but a
substance with its own qualities of thickness and thinness. Negation not only
is real but also comprises four of the eight fundamental categories of existence:
prior negation (the absence of an object before it is born), posterior negation
(the absence of an object after it is destroyed), absolute or infinite negation
(the absence of an object in all times and places except where it happens to
be), and mutual negation (the exclusion of two existing things from each other).
Prabhakara took the radically opposite stance from Kumarila: negation
does not exist; reality is always positive, and the forms of negation are merely
statements of inference. Here Prabhakara seems to be borrowing Dignaga’s
doctrine that negation is purely conceptual, while attempting to avoid Dig-
naga’s corollary that the world is a positive existent without distinctions, which
Prabhakara as a pluralist realist could not accept (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:480).
He attempted to control the damage by arguing that there is no negation in
general, no non-being as a negation of nothing in particular; all negation is of
a definite and positive object, and being is all that exists. Kumarila, by contrast,
implicitly responded to the Bhartrihari-Dignaga-Dharmakirti doctrine that if
negation is purely nominal and illusory, then objective reality must be undif-
ferentiated. For Kumarila, the pluralism of real entities must be defended, and
that calls for the reality of negation—indeed, a whole array of negations to
account for differences in time as well as among contemporaneous objects.
Debate over Knowledge and Illusion. Predictably, Prabhakara and Kumarila
also split over epistemology (Raju, 1985: 50–56; Potter, 1976: 197–212). Both
adopt a viewpoint that is close to the Buddhist: everything that is known, is
known through one’s consciousness. Since there is no criterion of the validity
of knowledge outside of consciousness, Prabhakara draws the conclusion that
knowledge is valid in itself. False judgments arise not because of conscious
perception but because of the intrusion of other factors, such as physical
interference with one’s eyes, or memories and inferences superadded to the
perception. When one mistakes a rope lying on the jungle path for a snake,
the simple perceptual judgment is nevertheless true. The object exists and
causes the perception. There is no way to falsify a simple judgment; if it is
falsified by a second perception (looking more closely at the rope), this proves
that the first judgment was not itself simple. Subsequent cognitions do not
prove that a first cognition is true; they can only confirm that it was a simple
cognition. The truthfulness of the cognition can be given only by itself.
Prabhakara defends an extreme realism against any Buddhist-like episte-
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