The Better Philosopher Nobody Tells Stories About

We know almost nothing about him, and half of Indian philosophy of language is downstream of his position.

Prabhakara worked around the middle of the sixth century, probably 600 to 650, and came from Kerala, from the Malabar country under the Cheras. That is very nearly the whole of the biography.

Tradition says Kumarila Bhatta was so struck by his intelligence that he called him Guru, teacher, and the name stuck, so that his whole school is known as the Prabhakara or Guru school. Some scholars doubt the two men were connected at all.

He wrote the Brihati, a commentary on Shabara's commentary on the Mimamsa Sutras, and out of it built a system that has been argued with for fourteen hundred years.

Two schools, one question

Mimamsa split into two: Kumarila's Bhatta school and Prabhakara's. And some scholars hold that the original teaching of Mimamsa is better preserved in Prabhakara than in the more famous Kumarila.

Their central disagreement looks technical and is not. It is about how a sentence means anything.

Kumarila's position, abhihitanvaya: words have their own meanings, independently. You know what cow means and what bring means. A sentence works by assembling those meanings and then relating them. Meaning is built up from parts.