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Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta

Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta are the two schools of Vedic exegesis: Mīmāṃsā reads the Veda’s injunctions, Vedānta its closing part, the Upaniṣads. Their root texts open on the same words, athāto … jijñāsā. The Mīmāṃsāsūtra, ascribed to Jaimini and dated near the beginning of the common era: “Next therefore (comes) the enquiry into Dharma” (tr. Jha). The Brahmasūtra, ascribed to Bādarāyaṇa and dated between 200 BCE and 200 CE: the enquiry into Brahman, or more literally, as its translator Thibaut notes, “the desire of knowing Brahman”.

Mīmāṃsā means investigation, here the investigation of what the Veda’s texts mean. Śabara’s commentary, from around 400, is the earliest that survives complete; Kumārila (around 660) and Prabhākara (around 700) founded its two later lines.

Śabara says why the inquiry is needed at all: “learned men have held divergent views regarding Dharma … if a man were to undertake an act without due consideration, he might take up any one act at random and would thereby ruin himself” (tr. Jha). The sūtra defines dharma as “that which is indicated by (known by means of) the Veda as conducive to the highest good” (1.1.2), and rules out perception, which “apprehends only things existing at the time” (1.1.4); dharma, Śabara explains, “is something that is yet to come”. Only the Veda can make it known. Kumārila secured this with a theory of knowledge: “authoritativeness is inherent in all Means of Right Notion” (Ślokavārttika, tr. Jha). A cognition stands until a fault shows it false, and the Veda, which no person spoke (apauruṣeya), has no speaker whose faults could undo it. The work proceeds topic by topic (adhikaraṇa), each, in the later Jaiminīyanyāyamālāvistara attributed to Mādhava, with five members: the subject, the doubt, the connection, the opponent’s view and the conclusion.

Śaṅkara, in the eighth century, set the two inquiries apart by their fruit. Knowledge of dharma yields prosperity (abhyudaya) and depends on acts still to be performed; knowledge of Brahman yields the highest good (niḥśreyasa) and depends on no further act. The study of the Vedānta texts, he says, is begun “with a view to freeing one’s self from that wrong notion which is the cause of all evil and attaining thereby the knowledge of the absolute unity of the Self” (tr. Thibaut).

Not everyone may begin. Śaṅkara names four conditions: “the discrimination of what is eternal and what is non-eternal; the renunciation of all desire to enjoy the fruit (of one’s actions) both here and hereafter; the acquirement of tranquillity, self-restraint, and the other means, and the desire of final release” (Brahmasūtrabhāṣya 1.1.1).

Reasoning has a bounded place in it. “In matters to be known from Scripture mere reasoning is not to be relied on … As the thoughts of man are altogether unfettered, reasoning which disregards the holy texts and rests on individual opinion only has no proper foundation”, and “even men of the most undoubted mental eminence, such as Kapila, Kaṇāda [founders of Sāṃkhya and Vaiśeṣika], and other founders of philosophical schools, have contradicted one another” (2.1.11). Śaṅkara lets an objector reply that this very want of foundation “really constitutes the beauty of reasoning”, and answers that in the matter of release reasoning still fails. What he admits is reasoning favoured by scripture, as an auxiliary of experience (anubhava, 2.1.6), and experience is where the inquiry into Brahman ends (1.1.2). Thibaut translates anubhava as “intuition”.

The Vedāntins also surveyed the schools from their own end point. The fourteenth-century Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha, attributed to Mādhava, lists sixteen systems, from the materialists through the Buddhists, the Jainas, the theistic schools, Vaiśeṣika, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā and grammar to Sāṃkhya and Yoga, “for the delight of the good”: “who finds not delight in a garland strung of various flowers?” (tr. Cowell and Gough). The systems run in “a gradually ascending scale”, in Cowell’s description, from those furthest from Vedānta to those nearest it. The last, Śaṅkara’s own, is only named: “the crest-gem of all systems, has been explained by us elsewhere; it is therefore left untouched here”.