  Characteristic of this period of inter-traditional debate is the legendary account of Kumārila as having studied for a time at the famous Buddhist monastic university at Nālandā, then in its prime. Based on the mastery of Buddhist doctrine he thus gained, Kumārila went on to decisively counter Buddhist philosophical positions. According to a Buddhist variation on such legendary reflections of the state of philosophical contestation (one recorded by the 17th-century Tibetan historian Tāranātha), Kumārila is indeed represented as having defeated various lesser Buddhist thinkers in debate. However, his renown prompted the Buddhist Dharmakīrti, in turn, to go in disguise to study with Kumārila, from whom Dharmakīrti learns the key to Kumārila’s thought and then bests him in debate, converting Kumārila and his followers to Buddhism. As history, such accounts are surely as suspect as the view (still attested in some Indian scholarship) that Kumārila’s dialectical successes are chiefly to be credited for the decline of Indian Buddhism. Nevertheless, these traditions confirm at least that Kumārila was a formidable philosophical opponent of his Buddhist counterparts. It is fitting, then, that among the sources for studying Kumārila’s thought should be not only the texts of Mīmāṃsaka commentators on his work—particularly Uṃveka Bhaṭṭa (fl. c. 710), Pārthasārathimiśra (fl. c. 1075), and Sucaritamiśra (c.1120)—but also the work of the scholar Buddhist Śāntarakṣita (c.725–788), whose massive Tattvasaṃgraha extensively engages (and quotes from the works of) Kumārila.