The book under review consists of two volumes: Part 1 (xlvi + 97 pages), with the critical edition of the text (61 pages), a methodological introduction, and an index; and Part 2 (627 pages), with a long introductory study (104 pages), a detailed summary of the translated text (60 pages, plus a synopsis), an annotated translation, an extensive index, and a bibliography including Japanese studies, often overlooked by Western scholars.

Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, the author of the text edited and translated by Kataoka, lived between the fifth and the seventh centuries AD and is widely regarded as the champion of the Bhāṭṭa branch of the Mīmāṃsā school. This school of classical Indian philosophy focuses on the Sacred Texts (the Vedas), their hermeneutics, and the epistemological justification of their validity. Kumārila was the Mīmāṃsā author who more than any other pushed Mīmāṃsā into the philosophical arena, and thus he went beyond the tackling of problems posed by Vedic epistemology per se, to generalize the issue of the validity of Vedic texts into that of the validity of cognition in general (see below). This turns his Ślokavārttika (henceforth ŚV) into a mine of information on the topics hinted at in the title, i.e. truth (the present reviewer would prefer “epistemological validity”), omniscience (is it epistemologically justifiable?), and killing (given that killing is wrong, how can the texts which prescribe it retain their epistemological validity?). The index allows the reader to select the themes s/he is more interested in and to read about them in the summary and then in the translation.

Why should one need a further edition of the codanā section of the ŚV, when several editions of the whole ŚV have already been published? Kataoka started by enumerating some problems which are common to many other editions of Sanskrit texts:

1. 1. The text is not soundly grounded on manuscripts.

2. 2. Readers cannot evaluate the reliability of the text, since no information concerning the manuscripts employed is available in the Introduction.

Two further issues specifically relate to the ŚV editions:

1. 1. There is not a single edition which is reliable enough.

2. 2. The additional manuscripts consulted by Kataoka provide alternative readings.

Kataoka consulted seven published editions and five manuscripts. He has made an excellent contribution by elucidating the relations among the editions (as he did in his critical editions of several sections of Bhaṭṭa Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī), thus making it clear that most of them are just copies of previous ones, with additional mistakes.

The number of manuscripts might, instead, make some eyebrows rise. As Kataoka himself wrote, “there are other Ślokavārttika manuscripts in various libraries inside and outside India” (Part 1, p. xxxviii). He did not offer any estimate of the total number of these other manuscripts, and the volume of the New Catalogus Catalogorum which will include the ŚV has not yet been published. The (old) Catalogus Catalogorum Footnote ¹ has four entries for the ŚV, and twelve for its commentaries by Pārthasārathi Miśra and Sucarita Miśra. One of the four ŚV-specific entries comes from the North Western Provinces Catalogue.Footnote ² This catalogue lists manuscripts belonging to private collections, which are very difficult to locate now, after almost one and a half centuries. Another entry, from Rajendralala Mitra's Catalogue,Footnote ³ also refers to a private collection. The remaining entries call in two manuscripts which are kept in the library of the Government Sanskrit College in Benares (one is recorded in Hall's catalogue).Footnote ⁴

An extremely quick search for manuscripts of the relevant portion of the ŚV allowed the present reviewer to find a further manuscript of the ŚV alone, one of its commentary by Uṃveka Bhaṭṭa, and two of its commentary by Sucarita in the Catalogue of the Adyar Library,Footnote ⁵ as well as one more manuscript of the commentary by Sucarita in the Catalogue of the Sampurnanand Sanskrit University Library.Footnote ⁶ The conclusion one is able to draw is that, in spite of its paramount importance within Indian Philosophy, the ŚV has not been copied very frequently.

Among Mīmāṃsā works, the copies of later works or primers largely outnumber the copies of the ŚV. Slightly more frequent are the copies of the Tantravārttika by Kumārila, and the copies of commentaries on the ŚV. Thus, Kataoka's choice of focusing on just five manuscripts should not be compared to the choice of, e.g., an editor of a well-known Purāṇa who neglected hundreds of manuscripts.

Why did not Kataoka attempt a recensio of the available manuscripts? Because the ones he had gained access to (two in Oxford, two in London, and one from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta) provided him “with enough information for a reliable text” (p. vii). This might be factually true, but how can one demonstrate it unless one has examined the other manuscripts? Even if one chooses to prepare a critical edition on the basis of a selected number of manuscripts (or on the basis of a single codex optimus), how is one to select them unless one has the full range of manuscripts to select from? The present reviewer hopes that further scholars will fill in the gaps and complete a recensio and an evaluation of the manuscript material available for the ŚV.

The real strength of the present edition lies in its apparatus of parallel passages as well as in the editor himself. Kataoka is in fact a profound expert of Mīmāṃsā and particularly of Kumārila and of Śabara (whose text Kumārila comments upon in the ŚV). The apparatus of parallel passages immediately enables the reader to locate Kumārila on the proscenium of Indian philosophy by realizing that his work has been quoted by an enormous number of Mīmāṃsākas and of Buddhist Pramāṇavādins, from Ratnakīrti to Jñānaśrīmitra, from Śāntarakṣita to Prajñākaragupta, etc. Passages of ŚV, codanāsūtra are also found in Nyāya works (Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī and Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyabhūṣaṇa), in Advaita Vedānta works (once in Maṇḍana Miśra's Brahmasiddhi and several times in Rāmādvayācārya's Vedāntakaumudī) and in those of Jaina (e.g., in Vādideva Sūri's Syādvādaratnākara). As for the sources of Kumārila himself, beside the Mīmāṃsā ones, Kataoka detected in his work unacknowledged (and unexpected) quotes from the Yogabhāṣya, the Padārthadharmasaṇgraha, and the Nyāyabhāṣya.

The edition is accompanied by an accurate word-by-word translation, which is more of a gloss to the edition itself and makes each editorial choice crystal clear, since all words are translated. With each page the feeling grows that Kataoka tried to fully understand the text he was editing instead of just keeping on typing the text until a variant reading or a blatant mistake appeared.Footnote ⁷ Kataoka's choice is extreme, as he puts in brackets every single Sanskrit word (even dharma, which is rendered as “dharma” in the translation). The reader is thus enabled to follow the translator's train of thought at every step. Readers who have no interest in the Sanskrit text and only wish to read Kumārila's philosophical arguments, instead, might be slightly annoyed by accuracy being privileged over readability in English. The extensive summary is the most appropriate tool to be recommended to them. By firstly presenting the arguments in a non-technical way, it makes it possible to dip into the translation at a second stage.

In the introduction to the Sanskrit text (pp. xv–xix), Kataoka dared to raise a thought-provoking issue, namely: “In which direction should research in Mīmāṃsā proceed?” His answer is that the research should proceed through:

1. 1. “critical editions based on manuscripts;

2. 2. annotated translations, which provide a basis for further studies;

3. 3. the reconstruction of the history of Indian philosophy” (Part 1, p. xvi).

To such a numbered list it could be objected that, in fact, the three points are all part of the same hermeneutic circle, rather than separate steps of a linear process. However, Kataoka's book is in itself an evidence of the circular approach of its author, since all the three elements are equally present and constantly interplaying.

Furthermore, Kataoka suggested the parallel of the studies on Dharmakīrti. The latter is the most prominent philosopher of the Buddhist school of epistemology (also called Pramāṇavāda). He was most probably a younger contemporary of Kumārila since he seems to directly respond to Kumārila's arguments, whereas Kumārila addressed the Buddhist epistemology with no specific mention of Dharmakīrti's original contributions to it.

Studies on Dharmakīrti have flourished in the West, in Japan and partly in India after the publication of Stcherbatsky's Buddhist Logic.Footnote ⁸ The interest in Dharmakīrti's thought has led to the publication of a number of critical editions of various sections of works by Dharmakīrti himself and by his commentators as well, and to many insightful analyses of his theories. Kataoka wrote:

The last point is outside the focus of the book under review, but both of these points highlight an inclination towards a philosophical and ideengeschichtlich (“aiming at reconstructing the history of ideas”) understanding which is typical of Kataoka's work in general and of this book in particular.

In a very useful initial chapter of the Introduction, Kataoka discusses the translation by G. Jhā and adds to the usual praises of his pioneer work the remark that “what scholars now need are more detailed, careful studies that enable them to place Kumārila's thought into the history of Indian philosophy and thus to evaluate his contributions thereto” (Part 2, p. 7). This is exactly what is achieved by the introductory study contained in the second volume, which presents Kumārila as one of the chief figures of Indian philosophy, especially within the Buddhist Pramāṇavāda vs. Mīmāṃsā debate. A separate chapter is dedicated to Kumārila's theory of the intrinsic validity of cognition, which is one of Kumārila's major contributions to Sanskrit epistemology. According to this theory, a cognition is immediately valid, unless and until it is proved to be wrong. The burden of proving it wrong lies thus on subsequent invalidating cognitions, whereas each cognition is by itself and since its outset to be considered valid. In fact, if it were the contrary we would either have to admit that epistemology has nothing to do with common experience (this is the path chosen by most Western epistemologists) or be trapped into a regressus ad infinitum. Suppose we admit that a cognition A is valid only once it has been validated. It then needs a further cognition validating it. Let us call this second cognition B. B, qua cognition, also needs a further cognition validating it. Hence, B needs C. But if B needs C, then C needs D, and so on. If one were to say that cognition B does not need any further validation, this would mean that one needs to stop somewhere. But then – Kumārila might ask – why not just stop straightaway at A?

Essays on Kumārila's theory of intrinsic validity have already been published by John TaberFootnote ⁹ and by Dan Arnold.Footnote ¹⁰ Kataoka added a focus on Kumārila alone (whereas Taber relied on Kumārila's commentators and Arnold on Taber), as well as a close-up analysis of how Kumārila used specific verbs in describing his own theory. Kataoka carefully distinguished three possible paths to understand the theory, namely from an ontological, epistemological and operational point of view. The distinction is well needed, since Western-trained readers – because of the foundational role of ontology in Western philosophy – might be inclined to read all Indian theories as ontological. By contrast, much progress can be made by looking at the same theory from different perspectives.

One of the positive traits of the whole enterprise is how much of its methodological approach is explicitly offered to the reader to be pondered about. Kataoka discussed his choices and described his criteria, at the risk of criticism. This is particularly apparent with Kataoka's interpretation of Kumārila, since Kataoka strongly upholds the view that commentaries should be used only as a third and last resource (after Kumārila's own other texts and after Kumārila's predecessors' ones), and that one should be cautious in using them, and always make the readers aware that one is doing so.

Apart from the specific issues at stake, the present reviewer is especially pleased that the author has made a conscious effort to discuss his priorities and to question his own approach. The opposite of a methodology that one is aware of is a methodology that drives the author and the reader without being apparent and, hence, with no chance of being steered.