entered the debates. Mimamsa defended the old Vedic rituals against the newer
meditative and theist religions. In order to explain how rituals could have
magical effects—and simultaneously to deny the efficacy of any other religious
practice—around 600 c.e. the Mimamsa philosophers formulated a magical-
religious version of the causality argument, holding that each person has a soul
substance, which accumulates karmic potentialities through ritual action. This
led the Mimamsa leaders onto the territory of current debates over the nature
of substance. Kumarila held that abstractions are real; negation, made central
by Dharmakirti, is itself a real entity. A dissident in the Mimamsa camp,
Prabhakara held that reality is always positive, and negation is not ontological
but only a logical inference; there is no negation in general, but only of
particulars. From these discussions Indian philosophy broke into the territory
of critical epistemology.
Like other Indian schools, Mimsaka accepted sensory perception as a valid
source of knowledge; since the school was concerned to show that long-dis-
tance causal processes (such as the accumulation of karma) are also valid, it
became an important issue to show how errors in perception occur. The general
issue of validity was explicitly raised: since everything is known through
consciousness, there is no criterion of valid knowledge outside of conscious-
ness. Prabhakara held that a perceptual illusion (mistaking a coiled rope for a
snake) shows not that perceptual consciousness is false, but only that one’s
second look (seeing the rope) reveals that the first look (seeing the snake) was
not a simple perception but the intrusion of memories or inferences. The
validity of cognition cannot be undermined, as its validity is given only by
itself. (A version of the argument was later used by G. E. Moore against the
abstract entities postulated by the logical formalists as in Russell’s mathemati-
cal set theory or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.) Kumarila by contrast held that
perceptual error comes from the imposition of a non-presence (a snake-mem-
ory) on a reality (the rope); since negations are also real, even errors are
perceptions of reality, leaving to be specified only what form the reality takes.
Debate between Prabhakara and Kumarila led to the formulation of an
Indian version of “cogito ergo sum.” The former held that the “I” is subject,
never an object, and thus cannot be the object of knowledge. The latter held
that the “I” emerges from inference, and thus is a valid form of knowledge.
Reflexivity becomes an explicit topic. Shankara now turns the Mimamsa
maneuvers in defense of worldly realism into a pathway to secure a transcen-
dent reality. Taking over Prabhakara’s self-validity of cognitive experience, he
notes that even doubt over reality implies a ground from which the doubt is
formulated; this self-luminescent ground at the root of consciousness is behind
all differentiations of worldly experience.
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^823