  Despite, however, Śabara’s probably warranted confidence that his interlocutors could never be in a position to show that sentences regarding the post-mortem careers of Vedic practitioners are falsified, the burden of proof will surely be thought by most to remain on him. It is at this point, though, that Kumārila more convincingly shifted, in effect, the burden of proof. His ground-breaking approach to epistemology involves raising a second-order question about the doxastic practices we take to be reliable (about, that is, pramāṇas). Of any way of knowing, then, that might be thought relevant to the adjudication of a claim such as Śabara’s (and Kumārila recognized that it is strategically advantageous in this regard to focus especially on perception), Kumārila asks:  does it have its status as epistemically reliable—does it have, as Kumārila puts it, its prāmāṇya, or “being a pramāṇa”—“intrinsically” (svataḥ), or does it have this property only on account of something else (parataḥ)? What Kumārila thus asks is whether any cognition’s having the epistemic qualities in virtue of which it is to be reckoned a reliable warrant—truth-conduciveness, say, or the capacity to confer justification—is something that obtains immediately, or whether instead justification is necessarily mediated by one’s having higher-order reasons for confidence in one’s first-order cognitions.