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.