Meaning and Non-existence: Kumarila's Refutation of Dignaga's Theory of Exclusion

In the Apohavada chapter of his Slokavarttika, the seventh-century Hindu philosopher Kumarila undertakes an exhaustive critique of the distinctive Buddhist theory of meaning, the “theory of exclusion”, or Apohavada. According to this theory, which was introduced by the sixth-century Buddhist thinker Dignaga, a word refers not to some positive entity such as a universal, but to an “exclusion”. It became one of the core teachings of the Buddhist epistemological tradition. The debate on it is illustrative of the Buddhist-Brahmin disputes that shaped the development of classical Indian philosophy. This translation of Kumarila’s chapter, together with a critical edition, is accompanied by a running explanation based on the classical commentaries and extensive notes.