  Kumārila’s confidence in the genuinely referential nature of language is also reflected, finally, in his characteristic arguments for the idea that it is an enduring ātman (“self”) that is the underlying subject of all of our actions (and that therefore stands to realize, in the future, the fruits of Vedic practices). Like thinkers in the Brahmanical Nyāya tradition of philosophy, Kumārila (here closely following Śabara) was concerned to vindicate this conviction particularly in the face of Buddhist arguments to the contrary (the claim that persons are “without self,” or anātma, being a cardinal Buddhist doctrine). Kumārila’s intuitions in this regard center on the thought that “the notion ‘I’” (ahaṃ-pratyaya) must have a real referent. That this is so, he argues, is directly experienced in the case of memory, the content of which constitutively involves reference to “I” as the subject of past experiences now remembered. In contrast, then, to arguments (such as those offered by many proponents of Nyāya) to the effect that memory presupposes an enduring subject, Kumārila’s distinctive claim is that in the always first-personally indexed content of mnemonic experience we really “encounter” the referent of the first-person pronoun. Insofar, that is, as it doesn’t make sense to think one might remember an experience, and at the same time be uncertain about whose experience it is that’s remembered, it must be thought that there is in this case genuine “recognition” (pratyabhijñā) of the referent of “the notion ‘I’.” (See, especially, Ślokavārttika, ātmavāda, verses 107–110; Jha 1983, trans., 401–02; Taber 1990.)