The Man Who Went Into the Fire for a Lie

Kumarila is said to have burned himself alive, slowly, for telling a lie.

Whether that happened is another matter, and we will come to it. But it is the story the tradition kept about him, and it tells you what kind of man they thought he was.

What he was defending

Kumarila Bhatta worked in the seventh century, in the school called Mimamsa, and to understand him you have to understand what Mimamsa was for, because it is not what people expect philosophy to be about.

Mimamsa is the philosophy of ritual. Its subject is the Veda: how to interpret its injunctions, what makes an instruction binding, what dharma is and how anybody could know.

That sounds narrow. It is not. To defend Vedic authority in the seventh century you had to answer the question of how a text can be authoritative at all, which means a theory of knowledge, a theory of language, a theory of meaning, and an account of what makes any belief justified.

Mimamsa produced all four, in enormous technical detail, because it had to.