Jaina Narrative Refutations of Kumārila: Relative Chronology and the History of Jaina-Mīmām.sps h1.1sā Dialogues

Abstract

Assigning a date to Kumārila is notoriously difficult. Kumārila’s dates are usually assigned through a relative chronology of Brahmanical and Buddhist philosophers with whom Kumārila engages or is engaged. This is a precarious method because the dates of these interlocutors are equally unstable. But what if in considering systematic dialogues (śāstra) to be the primary medium for interreligious philosophical debate we have missed a source that does engage with Kumārila, and that can be reliably dated? In this article, I turn to a religious group whom, it has been previously thought, did not respond to Kumārila until the eighth century—Jainas—as well as to a genre that is not typically viewed as a site of systematic philosophical dialogue—narrative. I argue that the Padmacarita, a Jaina Rāmāyaṇa composed by a Digambara writer called Raviṣeṇa, contains a narrative refutation of Kumārila’s commentary to Mīmāṃsāsūtra 1.1.2. By bringing to light this refutation, and explaining how Raviṣeṇa’s Padmacarita can be reliably dated, I assign Kumārila’s terminus ante quem to the date of the Padmacarita’s composition, 676 CE. Finally, I suggest that Raviṣeṇa’s Padmacarita is the earliest extant Jaina text to discuss Kumārila’s claims, and that Jainas used narrative to reflect on Mīmāṃsā before they turned to śāstra as another medium for this dialogue.