Vedic Practice, Ritual Studies and Jaimini's Mīmāṃsāsūtras

Dharma and the Enjoined Subject

Samuel G. Ngaihte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000024494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

Drawing on insights from Indian intellectual tradition, this book examines the conception of dharma by Jaimini in his M?m??s?s?tras, assessing its contemporary relevance, particularly within ritual scholarship.

Presenting a hermeneutical re-reading of the text, it investigates the theme of the relationship between subjectivity and tradition in the discussion of dharma, bringing it into conversation with contemporary discourses on ritual. The primary argument offered is that Jaimini's conception of dharma can be read as a philosophy of Vedic practice, centred on the enjoinment of the subject, whose stages of transformation possess the structure of a hermeneutic tradition.

Offering both substantive and methodological insights into the contentions within the contemporary study of ritual, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Hindu studies, ritual studies, Asian religion, and South Asian studies.

1 Introduction

Preliminary background

The Pūrvamīmāṃsā, which is based on Jaimini’s seminal text known as the Mīmāṃsāsūtras, is a school of thought in Indian philosophy whose stature and nature of enquiry, particularly in light of its close connection with the elaborate practice of sacrifice in late Vedic times, have been a point of contention. The Mīmāṃsā has been generally observed in modern scholarship as a system of thought or a body of doctrines that is a ‘reasoned investigation of the earliest portions of the Veda’,¹ a ‘science of interpreting sentences’² and a ‘scholastic tradition’ that is ‘dedicated to the study of the language of the veda’³; however, it has also been simultaneously dismissed as an ‘orthodox’ tradition that is contemporarily irrelevant,⁴ and its credibility as one of the ṣaḍ-darśanas in Indian philosophy has often been treated with suspicion. As Biderman poignantly noted:

Mīmāṃsā has suffered many contemptuous attacks both in India and the West. It has been condemned by ‘spiritualists’ as a sterile, mechanistic, dogmatic ritualism. It has often been condemned by philosophers, both Western and Indian, as a rigid, narrow-minded school, whose contribution to Indian thought is at best marginal.⁵

The ‘marginal’ interests that have shaped the works of modern scholars, both Eastern and Western, which are classified here into two general groups, are particularly noteworthy for their lack of clarity about the purpose of Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsāsūtras and the paucity of investigation on the intelligibility of the Vedic world of sacrifice propounded by him. On the one hand, there are those who accept the Mīmāṃsā as a philosophical tradition even as they advance an anti-intellectual reading of its main theme of ‘ritual’, and on the other hand, there are those who take the Mīmāṃsā as an exegetical tradition that advances a science of language whose principles can be easily interposed across contexts.

As a school of Indian philosophy, the Mīmāṃsā system has attracted very little attention in comparison to the other schools of thought. Garge argues that modern scholars on Indian philosophy have largely neglected the Mīmāṃsā system, and maintains that the number of scholars engaged in the field indicates that the Mīmāṃsā is one of the ‘less favoured darśanas’ within Indian philosophy.⁶ According to him, those who do study the Mīmāṃsā system seek to introduce new themes while disregarding the ritual concerns as orthodox and redundant. Garge argues that this is a tendency that is recognizable even among early commentators such as Kumārila and Prabhākara, who in their engagements with Śabara’s Bhāṣya dwelled at great lengths on topics such as the idea of ‘god’, the ‘reality of the external world’, and mokṣa, even as they sought to establish the Mīmāṃsā as a darśana in light of the new Nyāya and Vedāntic insights, which often resulted in the divergence from the main theme of dharma.⁷ Arnold suggests that the Mīmāṃsā is discussed under the rubric of Indian ‘philosophy’ only because it is generally taken as ‘one of the six “orthodox” schools’ of Indian thought, but it has never been taken as a system of thought that has seriously contributed any ‘philosophical’ relevance.⁸ Kane best captures the sense of this prevailing general attitude towards the Mīmāṃsā:

The doctrines of the early and principal writers on Pūrva Mīmāṃsā are rather quaint and startling. Their arguments about the eternality and self-existence of the Veda are fallacious and were not accepted even by other ancient Indian systems. Both Prabhākara and Kumārila have in their scheme no place for God as the dispenser of rewards or as the ruler of man’s destiny as being pleased with men’s prayers. They do not expressly deny the existence of God, but they assign to god or the deities mentioned in the Vedic texts a secondary role or rather practically no role at all. They raise yajña to the position of God and their dogmas about yajña seem to be based upon a sort of commercial or business-like system, viz. one should do so many acts, dispense gifts to priests, offer certain offerings, observe certain ethical rules and other rules of conduct (such as not eating flesh, subsisting on milk) and then the reward would follow without the intervention of God. There is hardly any appeal to religious emotions, there is no omniscient being, no Creator and no creation of the world.⁹

The little that has been written about Mīmāṃsā in Radhakrishnan’s Indian Philosophy (Vol. 2) deals chiefly with the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of the system, without any discussion about Jaimini’s reflection on Vedic practice:

It is unnecessary to say much about the unsatisfactory character of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā as a system of philosophy. As a philosophical view of the universe it is strikingly incomplete. It did not concern itself with the problems of ultimate reality and its relation to the world of souls and matter. Its ethics was purely mechanical and its religion was unsound.¹⁰

Dasgupta mentions that the Mīmāṃsā cannot be properly spoken of as a system of philosophy and only gave it cursory attention in his History of Indian Philosophy,¹¹ and D’Sa argues that ‘the Mīmāṃsā is no more a living system and its name does not command much respect even among scholars, some of whom have gone to the extent of making it a sort of ancilla of the Uttarā Mīmāṃsā’.¹² Keith highlights that Mīmāṃsā ‘discussions have necessarily little value’, as they primarily ‘deal with incidents of sacrifices, which flourished only in the early days of the history of Mīmāṃsā’, and therefore sees ‘the labor devoted to their investigation’ as ‘mis-spent’.¹³ Dasgupta has stated that the Mīmāṃsā school no longer holds any interest even for the student of Indian philosophy,¹⁴ and, while the accusation might be far-fetched, the Mīmāṃsā school, particularly in contrast to the ‘more popular and influential Vedānta school’,¹⁵ continues to remain a school that is under-studied and under-appreciated, especially as ancient ‘Vedic sacrifices began to fall into disuse’.¹⁶ Smart’s assertion promptly captures the sense in which the Mīmāṃsā is often dismissed when he states that it is ‘the most archaic of the orthodoxies of India’.¹⁷

As an exegetical tradition, the Mīmāṃsā discussions concerning the theory of sound and language, in light of the resurgence of the problem of hermeneutics and language, have been explored to a considerable extent. These scholars turned to Śabara’s Bhāṣya (commentary) and the works of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa on the tarka-pāda (sections on reasoning/philosophy) in particular, and sought to uncover a theory of language to establish the Mīmāṃsā as an exegetical system. The works of Gachter, Bhat, and Taber are a few examples.¹⁸ These topics then become the central focus of study, which, while significant in their own terms, have largely taken the theme of ‘language’ and the ‘principles of interpretation’ from their sacrificial context, and developed them independently as the major contributions of the system. McCrea observes that the

standard practice in general surveys of Mīmāṃsā … has been to draw a sharp distinction between ‘philosophical topics’ (i.e. topics dealt with in the tarka-pāda) and ‘Mīmāṃsā topics proper’ (i.e. the interpretative questions dealt with in the 59 pādas of the Mīmāṃsāsūtra)

where the latter topics are taken as having ‘minor importance’ or are being ignored altogether as unconnected from the rest of the Sūtras.¹⁹ The rules and principles found in the Mīmāṃsāsūtras have been emphasized at the expense of the study of the system as a whole, and the ritual context within which these rules are made intelligible and effective has been sidelined. Within contemporary Mīmāṃsā scholarship, the contributions of the Mīmāṃsā understanding on ‘sound’, ‘word’, ‘grammar’, ‘semiology’, ‘linguistic analysis’, and ‘law’ have each become a central focus of study on their own. For example, the 25 essays collected in the momentous volume Studies in Mīmāṃsā edited by Dwivedi have sought to take the Mīmāṃsā out of its ritualistic interpretations to make it a part of the ‘global’ philosophy of language and religion by classifying it under topics such as ‘epistemology’, ‘philosophy’, ‘grammar’, ‘meaning’, and ‘language’.²⁰

The concerns of these two ways of representing the Mīmāṃsā enquiry differ, in that the former consigns the Mīmāṃsā as a redundant system because of its perceived ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘ritualism’, and the latter tries to make the system relevant to the contemporary resurgence of interest in the problem of the philosophy of language. However, the nature of investigation that prevails in these groups reveal that the Mīmāṃsāsūtras have largely been taken as a corpus that is already constituted and closed, and ostensibly dead. This ‘objectivist’ reading of the Mīmāṃsāsūtras combined with the discarding of the structures of understanding that constituted the enactment of Vedic practice remained distant to the ritualistic conception of dharma that was central for Jaimini’s constitution of the Mīmāṃsā. In both these accounts, there seems to be an underlying assumption that the nature of Mīmāṃsā enquiry can be discussed apart from Jaimini’s central concern of dharma and its ritual context, and that it is only by distancing the discussion from the context of Vedic Brahmanical ritual that the Mīmāṃsā can be productively developed as a darśana.

Therefore, despite the importance and vitality of their work in light of the topics they had chosen to study, the selected interests that have contributed to the development of modern scholarship on Mīmāṃsā have not been able to provide insights about the nature of Jaimini’s enquiry. His reflections on the challenges of the Vedic world that confronted him and his defence of the practice of sacrifice as a tradition that demanded continued enactment were entirely sidelined. Despite their importance, these studies have also resulted in the fragmentation of the foundational text of the Mīmāṃsā tradition, thereby relegating it to a collection of topics that have no common concern or purpose. Clooney, who has written an insightful monograph on the Pūrvamīmāṃsā of Jaimini, goes to the extent of claiming that the Mīmāṃsāsūtras have not been understood in the ‘spirit’ in which they were written, neither by the commentators, nor by modern scholarship on Mīmāṃsā. He maintains that the text of Jaimini has remained unexplored as a whole, and thus makes his task a ...