On Pūrva Mīmāṃsā

Prof. Francis Clooney's article "Why the Veda has No Author" [1] is an excellent survey of the early work of the Hindu school of thought known as (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā. The word pūrva also means "early" or "prior", but Prof. Clooney's reference here to the "early work" does not mean the distinction between (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā and Uttara Mīmāṃsā, better known as Vedānta, but to the historically earliest work done by scholars who identified themselves as Mīmāṃsakas: Jaimini, the 2nd century BC author of the Pūrva-mīmāṃsā-sūtra, and Śabara, the great commentator who came four hundred years later. This is important because the school of Mīmāṃsā later splits into two traditions, the Bhāṭṭa, deriving authority from the formidable Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, and the Prābhākara, from Prabhākara Miśra. (The initial long 'ā' in the names of the schools, as opposed to the short 'a' in the names of their founders, is not a typo but a well-established Sanskrit grammatical phenomenon known as vṛddhi. In this particular case, vṛddhi is effected by the use of the so-called aṆ suffix, which has the sense of "descendant" or "offspring".)

Prof. Clooney notes that Mīmāṃsā is

"a worldview and mode of inquiry that developed in a context of reflection on the meaning of the action of sacrifice. In Mīmāṃsā, notions such as "God," the "sacred text," the "author" and the "anthropocentric ordering of reality" were already subjected to a radical critique more than two thousand years ago, and the primary vehicle of this critique was an uncompromising commitment to a reworking of religious discourse on a ritual basis." (p. 660)

The earliest textual evidence for this particular Weltanschauung is Jaimini's Pūrva-mīmāṃsā-sūtra, which, as Prof. Clooney notes, argues that

"[1] religion includes meanings and values appropriate to human beings, but the sum of its meaning necessarily exceeds the human perspective;

[2] the sacred Sanskrit-language Scripture known as the Veda is not a 'book' to be read, nor a source of information about a world exterior to itself; and

[3] the Veda has no author, no meaning beyond the words and the sacrificial intentions themselves; one cannot appeal to a pre-verbal intention to get beyond the words." (p. 660)

The Mīmāṃsakas operated in a religious world dominated by "two interconnected systems", that of the "traditional sacrifices, which had been practiced and described even a thousand years earlier," and that of the "Veda, the totality of the texts relevant to the sacrifices" (p. 661). This dynamic duo of text and ritual, each highly structured on its own and also deeply linked to the other, was what the Mīmāṃsakas investigated and defended against all attacks, both from within the "Hindu" system, such as the Naiyāyika natural theologians, and from without, such as the Buddhists and Jains. A large part of the Mīmāṃsā enterprise thus boils down to a sophisticated process of exegesis whose initial motivation was to understand instructions for the performance of ritual, but whose eventual scope broadened to pretty much any situation where texts were read and actions were performed.

Turning again to Prof. Clooney, "each generation of Mīmāṃsakas sought to elaborate more and more sweeping rules by which to govern the preceding set of meta-rules, although the search for generality was constantly subverted by the precise demands posed by the concrete ritual situations to which the interpreter eventually would have to return" (p. 662). It wasn't that the Mīmāṃsakas formulated ritual handbooks (those had been composed and circulated possibly a thousand years before Jaimini); what they were concerned with was a process closer to what we might consider legal reasoning. (Don Davis's new book, The Spirit of Hindu Law [2], constructs a useful analogy between Mīmāṃsaka thinking and the complexities of navigating the US tax law system.) In the process, they also defended particular positions within the philosophy of language—but always with an eye to preserve the integrity of the sacrifice.

More interestingly, from our perspective outside the dynamic dyad, the Mīmāṃsakas also asked and answered (to their satisfaction, at least) questions regarding the underlying assumptions of their worldview, about "the overall purposes of sacrifices, or the basis on which one can say that the Vedic scriptures are absolutely true, or the manner of verifying the efficacy of sacrifices" (p. 662). This was all the more important because the great rivals of the Brahminical orthodoxy were the Buddhists and Jains, who questioned (as we might today) the whole purpose and efficacy of the Vedic sacrificial system.

Prof. Clooney points out insightfully that

"Mīmāṃsā's response to the whole range of criticisms was to rethink its world without reliance on any single viewpoint, effectively undercutting the possibility of a single perspective. It sought a justification for sacrifice that needed no external validation, either from active gods or satisfied humans, and that required the positing neither of any supernatural realities nor a reliable world order beyond that of good Sanskrit texts, well-performed sacrifices, and a set of rules for integrating the two.

"Jaimini and his commentator Śabara primarily were concerned with achieving a right understanding of the rules of sacrificial action and sacrificial text so as to ensure that what one saw and heard at a sacifice would cohere—be intelligible—regardless of what anyone might say about it from some particular perspective. In discovering these rules they sought to repplace the 'laws of the cosmos' with the 'laws of language and ritual,' and reliance on gods and humans (as norms for meaning) with an appreciation for the harmony of text and action (and everything accompanying them, even in orthodox society as a whole) that underlay the well-wrought sacrifice." (p. 663)

Read the rest of the awesome article to find out more about the Mīmāṃsā worldview, and what it may mean for us today when we no longer follow the Vedic system of sacrifice.

<UPDATE>

I simply had to include this line from the article that compares the Mīmāṃsā exegetical enterprise to Foucault:

"The Mīmāṃsā theory of authorlessness [apauruṣeyatva; emphasis in the original], with its underlying concern to 'liberate' the sacred texts from its author, approaches Michel Foucault's influential interpretation of the common (though not universal) way in which the author-function is used as a societal tool to restrain language, assign responsibility, and confine the meaning of texts. Foucault shows how this author-function … actually restricts texts by ordering them to a designated author, whose intentions determine what the texts are allowed to mean … [Mīmāṃsā] decided that reference to the author as the privileged source of meaning limited the Veda, cut it off from its ritual context, and made it liable to the mistakes and limitations of the author."

</UPDATE>

References
[1] Clooney, Francis X. "Why the Veda Has No Author: Language as Ritual in Early Mīmāṃsā and Post-Modern Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter), pp. 659–684. Available here from JSTOR.

[2] Davis, Jr., Donald R. The Spirit of Hindu Law. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Available here from Amazon.