Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 67

58
THE KARMA-MIMAMSA
and in some cases by action also, in places where the duties of the castes are duly supervised by the king. Prabhākara. however, declines to admit of generalities such as Brahmanbood and Ksatriyahood, which Kumārila accepts.
Prabhākara also differs from Kumārila in his use of the category of inherence as a means of explaining the relation of the individual to the generality. When a new individual of a class comes into being, what is produced is not the existence of the generality, which is eternal, but of the relation of inherence between the individual and the class. Inherence differs from contact in that it does not presuppose the previous existence of the things affected by it, and, uplike the Nyāya-Vaišeşika, Prabhākara does not hold that it is necessarily eternal. This affords an easy reply to the question of the fate of the class character on the destruction of an individual; it does not go away, as it has no motuli, it does not subsist in the individual, which is no longer in being, it does not cease to exist, for it remains in other individuals, but the inherence between the class and the individual comes to an end. But Kumārilat rejects in toto the idea of inherence as a true category; a relationship, he argues, can exist only between things which are established as distinct entities, and, as inherence is supposed to be a relation between things which, like the class and the individual, are inseparable, it is a contradiction in terms.
While Kumārila's school admits, as usual, the existence of generalities of substance, quality, and action, Prabhakara declines to accept the last two or a summum genus of existence as a real generality, on the ground that, as each generality rests on the fact of actual perception, the genus existence must be disallowed, as we do not in fact perceive things as merely existing. The true sense of existence is merely the individuality of things (svartpesutta); it is not a true class character.
Similarity as a category is asserted by Prabhākara, who holds that its existence is proved by our consciousness in
1 Slokaväritiea, I, 1, 4, vv. 146-55; cf. Asoka's Avajaviniraka Owu (Sh* Buddhu Nyoyo Tracts pp 78-86) -Pakarang
pp 110 111 Slokaddrizka pp 438 41 (YY 18-23) 565 ( 74-71 Tarkvarako p 164