Mimamsa Sutra

The founding text of the darshana that reads the Veda as a body of commands. Jaimini’s Mimamsa Sutra opens with a question and closes the question in its second line, and everything the school became follows from that pair of aphorisms.

What it is

A long work of aphorisms, arranged in twelve adhyayas, dealing with the interpretation of Vedic injunction: what counts as a command, how commands relate to praise and narrative, what to do when passages conflict, who is entitled to perform which rite, and how the parts of a sacrifice hang together.

It opens athato dharmajijnasa, now therefore the inquiry into dharma, a formula that deliberately echoes the opening of the Brahma Sutra and announces the subject as an inquiry rather than a report.

The second aphorism gives the definition that fixes the school’s whole character: codanalaksano ‘rtho dharmah, dharma is that good which is indicated by the injunction. Dharma is not read off from nature, deduced by reason, or felt in the conscience. It is known only from codana, Vedic command. Where scripture merely praises, or tells a story, or states a fact, Mimamsa files that under arthavada, subordinate eulogy, whose job is to lend force to the commands around it.

The commentary that made it readable

The sutras are terse to the point of being unusable alone, and the tradition reads them through Shabara’s Shabara-bhashya, the earliest full commentary to survive. Its date is disputed, placed variously from the early centuries of the common era to around 400 CE.

Above Shabara sit the two sub-schools, founded by two seventh-century commentators on him. Kumarila Bhatta wrote the Slokavarttika, Tantravarttika and Tuptika; Prabhakara wrote the Brihati. They differ on the number of valid means of knowledge and on much else, and the division holds to this day.

How it reached English

Ganganatha Jha translated the Shabara-bhashya in three volumes between 1933 and 1936, and the Slokavarttika and Tantravarttika between 1900 and 1924. All are public domain, and all are still the standard English route into the school.

What is not in it

Theology, and almost everything a reader expects from a philosophy of religion. Mimamsa in its classical form has no interest in a creator, argues that the Veda is authorless and beginningless rather than revealed by anyone, and treats liberation as a late and secondary concern. The system is about the logic of obligation.

Its afterlife is larger than its subject. The rules Mimamsa developed for resolving conflicting injunctions were taken over wholesale by Indian jurisprudence, and P. V. Kane devotes a volume of his History of Dharmasastra to their use in law. People who have never read a sutra of it still argue by its maxims.