  While such atomistic views might not be judged very promising, and while they are not obviously required by (and may even seem in tension with) such intuitions as that language essentially transcends individual occasions of use, they fit well with Kumārila’s additional commitment to thinking that the phonemes of Vedic Sanskrit are part of what is eternal in language—though it is surely difficult to imagine how something as eminently temporal as sound could thus be reckoned as in any sense timeless. Notwithstanding his counter-intuitive commitment to eternally existent phonemes, Kumārila was also an uncompromising realist about more clearly abstract universals, taking it, for example, that the referents of kind-terms are real properties such as being a cow. (See Scharf 1996.) This comes through not only in Kumārila’s philosophy of language, but also in his epistemology; against, then, Buddhists who argued (with Dignāga and Dharmakīrti) that perception is essentially non-conceptual, Kumārila firmly held that perceptions, properly speaking, immediately yield justified beliefs regarding things as the kinds of things they are; that perception thus discloses things under some description shows, among other things, that the kinds of conceptual items that figure in descriptions are real.