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A few points must suffice to indicate the nature of that Mimamsa background.
30 The Mimamsa tradition gained a definite form in the so-called Purva [Earlier] Mimamsa Sutras (henceforth PMS), attributed to Jaimini (2nd century BCE), and thereafter in the first written commentary on the PMS, the Bhasya of Sabara (2nd-4th centuries CE). |
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The PMS is an inquiry into dharma, which is both the right way of acting and the right order of the universe; this inquiry proceeds by a careful tracing of ritual events to their textual sources, and of texts to their places in ritual enactment: texts are inherently implicated in the world of ritual practice, and careful reading is the necessary prerequisite to coherent practice. |
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Mimamsa's careful distinctions and connections among words and actions were produced in a mode of exegesis that proceeded by the composition and scrutiny of specific "textual terrains" of introduced, examined and argued "case studies" known as adhikaranas. Argued out in these case studies according to rules postulated to help the Mimamsakas read and debate properly, the rhetorical and forensic discourse of Mimamsa leads inquirers ever more deeply into a correct and corrected reading, and consequently into more elaborate defenses of the coherence of that reading. In defense of this constructed and argued convergence of text and action, Mimamsa arranges the Vedic world into a sacrificially organized array of center and periphery, with all competing measures of significancethe gods, the author, the ordinary world, truthrelegated to the edge of discourse as merely contributory features. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is the event of sacrifice: dharma, the object of Mimamsa inquiry, is the sum of all right relations, the activated, fully understood and rightly connected set of all the small and large activities and things which together constitute the sacrificial whole. |
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Later, and in a subordinate fashion, Mimamsa articulates doctrines which stand independent, apart from the texts and rituals that they were first intended to support. Thus, in an important move to which we will advert below, the Mimamsakas argue the authorlessness of the Veda (apauruseyatva)and the self-validation of language, in order to defend before a wider |
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