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Mimamsa, preserving the distinctness of the Advaita project as a new response to a new desire, oriented to a new object of knowledge. |
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But the claim for the originality of the desire does not entail a complete break with Mimamsa. In both Mimamsas the desire is satisfied through a disciplined engagement in the investigation of texts, and the uniqueness of the desire need not entail the uniqueness of the methods of inquiry. In fact, the Advaita insistence on the (theoretical) exemption of knowledge from the material constraints accompanying actual ritual performance does not extend to a rejection of Mimamsa's mode of investigation, which was constructed in the context of ritual practice. Though the reading practice is correctly distinguished from ritual practice, the rejection of a requirement for ritual performance does not dissolve all formal and genealogical links to the ritual view of the world, and one reads toward a knowledge of Brahman with much the same methods of exegesis that were operative in regard to ritual materials and for the sake of a knowledge of dharma. |
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Hence, the opening of a path beyond works is spoken in a language intelligible primarily, perhaps exclusively, to those familiar with ritual and the Mimamsa language about ritual activity. Though the relationship of brahmajijñasa as desire to brahmajijñasa as inquiry is unique, and though neither bears exactly the relationship that dharma and dharmajijñasa bear in Mimamsa, nevertheless brahmajijñasa is not independent of texts; as an inquiry it is profoundly and massively implicated in the Mimamsa discourse, and expects practitioners who can become adept in that discourse. |
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In making the distinction between "jijñasa" as the instigating desire to know and "mimamsa" as the activity of inquiryequivalent to jijñasa as inquiryVacaspati explains how the purely unoriginated jijñasa inaugurates Mimamsa activity: |
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Nor is the desire to know (jijñasa) the same as inquiry (mimamsa,) so that, like the treatise on yoga, it might be something that one undertakes; the word "Mimamsa" . . . signifies an inquiry (vicara)that commands respect, while |
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