# The act keeps its own books

*The school that defended the Vedic rite when the Buddhists had all but buried it: the word is older than the god, a text with no author cannot be wrong, and nobody is needed to pay out the fruit of an act.*

Explainer Jun 15, 2025 [Fifth in a series on the six darśanas](/darsana)

Mīmāṃsā is the school that defended the Vedic rite when the Buddhists had all but buried it. To do that it argued that the word is older than the god, that a text with no author cannot be wrong, and that nobody is needed to pay out the fruit of an act. This post follows that argument, and then looks at what the rite actually was.

Mīmāṃsā Notes on the six darśanas, 5 of 6 28 minute read

*[Figure: The circuit of a rite: the offerer speaks the formula and lets go; Agni carries the offering; the deity is the word in the dative; the act leaves behind apūrva, which pays out the fruit later; a crossed-out box shows that no god is needed to give the fruit]*

***The circuit of a rite.** As I learned it: the offerer speaks the formula and lets go of the thing; Agni carries it; the deity is the word in the dative; and the act leaves behind a power, apūrva, that pays out its fruit when the time comes. The one piece of machinery the other schools kept, a god who hands out the fruit, Mīmāṃsā removed.*

This is the fifth of six posts in which I work through the six Indian philosophical schools one at a time, writing down what I have understood. The last two posts were about Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, the schools that asked how we know and what there is. This one is about the school that nobody wanted to call philosophy. Radhakrishnan, as my teacher reports him, refused the name outright: Mīmāṃsā is not darśana-śāstra, it is karma-śāstra, a code of ritual, and the common man has no use for it. And yet the same teacher ends his account by calling it unique, the one system without which the Veda would not have survived the Buddhist centuries and without which, as he puts it, Hindus would not know their own ceremonies.

Both verdicts are right, and the post is built to show why. Mīmāṃsā began as a manual for reading the Veda's instructions and ended up having to defend every assumption those instructions rested on: that the words are trustworthy, that the acts they command do something, that the something arrives even when no god is watching. In defending the rite it produced a theory of language, a theory of knowledge, and a theory of action that the other schools quietly borrowed. Advaita took its six means of knowing. Every account of karma in India leans on its idea that an act stores its own result.

A note on what this is. I am not a scholar of Mīmāṃsā; I am a compiler. These pages are my learning, set down in the order it made sense to me, from the teachers and books listed at the end. On this school my sources were thinner and more scattered than for the earlier posts, and they sometimes contradict each other, so where I add a date, a name or a standard reading they did not give, or choose between them, I say so in place. The diagrams are mine.

The word

## To examine closely

Mīmāṃsā मीमांसा means inquiry, critical analysis, close examination. "In this culture," I was taught, "the analysis of anything is called its mīmāṃsā." The name was earned. The school's founding text, the sūtras of Jaimini, is a long, patient attempt to read the Veda's instructions correctly: which sentence is a command, which is praise, which rite the fruit belongs to, what to do when two rules collide. Its first commentator, Śabara, built that reading into a system of argument strong enough to re-establish Vedic dharma.

The school is also called Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, the earlier inquiry, to distinguish it from Uttara Mīmāṃsā, the later inquiry, which is the school everyone knows as Vedānta. The two names come from the two halves of the one text they both claim. The earlier portion of the Veda, the hymns and the ritual manuals, tells you what to do; the later portion, the Upaniṣads, tells you what is. Jaimini's sūtras open with *athāto dharma-jijñāsā*, "now, therefore, the inquiry into dharma." The Brahma Sūtra opens with *athāto brahma-jijñāsā*, "now, therefore, the inquiry into Brahman." One word is different, and the whole of Indian religious history runs through the gap.

Where it sits

## One Veda, two inquiries

On the map of the schools, Mīmāṃsā has a precise place. The Vedic tradition had two sides, ritual and speculation, karma and jñāna. Pūrva Mīmāṃsā took the ritual side and Vedānta the side of knowledge; these two are direct continuations of the Veda. Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika built their systems on experience and reasoning and did not challenge the Veda. Cārvāka, Buddhism and Jainism arose in revolt against the ritual culture. That is the whole map: two schools that grow out of the text, four that grow up beside it, three that grow against it. Mīmāṃsā is the only one of the nine whose entire subject matter is the text itself.

*[Figure: One Veda split lengthwise: the earlier portion feeds the inquiry into dharma and Pūrva Mīmāṃsā; the later portion feeds the inquiry into Brahman and Vedānta; Śaṅkara's remark connects the two]*

***Two inquiries into one text.** The meaning of "pūrva" as the earlier portion of the Veda was implied in what I learned rather than stated; the Vedāntic opening sūtra and Śaṅkara's remark are as I was given them. Śaṅkara, on that account, held the two inquiries to have no necessary relation, and still called Jaimini's śāstra "very much needed" because people's minds had drifted toward reviling the Veda.*

It helps to hold onto one more thing from that map. All the schools except Cārvāka believe in a standing moral order. The Ṛgveda calls it ṛta; Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika call it adṛṣṭa, the unseen; Mīmāṃsā calls it apūrva. Keep that word in view. The whole post bends toward it.

Part one · Why it exists

## The crisis, the legend, the lineage

No school in India was founded in a vacuum, but Mīmāṃsā, as I learned the story, was founded in a rout.

Step 1

### The woman on the roof

Start with the circumstances. Buddhism had become the dominant intellectual force; Buddhist logicians had refuted Nyāya's inference; the Cārvākas, Jains and Buddhists had attacked the claim that the Veda was authorless and had torn the ritual procedures to shreds. "It seemed Vedic darśana would end. All history is witness to this." People had come to regard yajña as pākhaṇḍa, hypocrisy.

Then the legend, which the tradition tells with relish. A great scholar named Kumārila Bhaṭṭa was begging alms. A woman on a roof called down to him to spread his cloth and she would drop the food. He refused: a sannyāsī begs at three houses and eats only if one gives, so come down and give properly. She answered that if she came down, the shadow of a passing Buddhist monk might fall on her, and he might say *buddhaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi*, and her Vedic dharma would be finished. Kumārila understood from this how far things had gone, and vowed to protect the Veda.

What follows is a spy story. The Buddhists had built a logic that nobody on the Vedic side could answer, so Kumārila became a Buddhist, studied with their great logicians, absorbed everything, and then came back. Seizing their apoha theory of meaning and their other weak points, he began defeating their scholars one by one. Unable to beat him in argument, they found another way: your own dharma says that attacking the guru you learned from is the greatest sin, and you learned from us. Kumārila accepted the charge. The expiation he chose was to give up the body with which he had sinned. Śaṅkara, touring the country to restore the Veda, reached him too late to change his mind; Kumārila handed over his books, named his disciple Maṇḍana Miśra as the man who would carry on, and burned. Śaṅkara then found Maṇḍana, debated him with Maṇḍana's wife Bhāratī as judge, won, renamed him Sureśvara, and seated him on his own pīṭha.

**My addition, from the books.** Everything in the previous paragraph was told to me as history. It comes from the Śaṅkara hagiographies composed many centuries later (Mādhava's Śaṅkaradigvijaya and others), which also supply the slow fire of rice husks and the debate judged by Ubhaya Bhāratī. Modern scholarship generally doubts that Maṇḍana and Sureśvara were the same person. An article on the history of yajña by one of my teachers, which Part five draws on, is in a different mood: it names Kumārila and Maṇḍana simply as Śaṅkara's collaborators against the Buddhist doctrines of no-God and no-self, with no story attached. Read the legend as the tradition's memory of what the stakes felt like.

The lineage as I learned it is short. Jaimini wrote the sūtras. Śabara wrote the first commentary. Kumārila's school is called Bhāṭṭa; the school of Prabhākara, whom I was taught to call Kumārila's disciple, is called Prābhākara or Guru-mata, "the teacher's view." A third school, Murāri's, "does not carry much weight." Then Maṇḍana, then Śaṅkara.

*[Figure: Lineage as I learned it: Jaimini, Śabara, then Kumārila and Prabhākara with Murāri to one side, then Maṇḍana Miśra, Śaṅkara, and Sureśvara; approximate dates added below]*

***The line as I learned it.** Two things to hold loosely: tradition calls Prabhākara "Guru" and tells a story of him as Kumārila's pupil who out-argued his teacher, while many scholars think he was a contemporary or earlier; and the Maṇḍana-to-Sureśvara arrow is the legend's, not history's. The dates are standard estimates, added from the books.*

Step 2

### Three jobs

Once the rout is understood, the shape of the school follows. The Mīmāṃsakas had three things to do, and the list is the table of contents for the next two parts.

First, prove that the Veda is eternal, because the Buddhists said it was not: "sometimes this was written in, sometimes that." Second, prove that the Veda has no author, because the Cārvākas said cunning Brāhmaṇas had written it to loot simple people. Third, restore the procedure of the rites, because it had been lost: "the performer of the Agniṣṭoma surely attains svarga, but nobody knows the procedure." That third job is the one that made Mīmāṃsā a ritual manual, and it had a consequence nobody planned. In fixing the exact words of each rite, the school gave the words so much weight that the gods receded behind them. "The devatās became secondary. The devatās are subordinate to the mantras." We will come back to that.

Part two · The word

## Why the text can be trusted

Everything in Mīmāṃsā rests on one claim: the Veda cannot be wrong. The claim has two supports, and both are arguments about language.

Step 3

### The word is older than its meaning

The first support is that the word, śabda, is eternal. The argument comes in a form a child could follow and a philosopher could spend a career on. What is the meaning of *jala*? *Pānī*. But pānī is also a word. What is the meaning of pānī? Water. Another word. You never arrive at a meaning that is not itself a word; you only move from one word to the next. So, the Mīmāṃsakas concluded, the word is primary and the meaning is secondary. Patañjali had said the same in his great commentary on grammar. A word is never destroyed; what we call a word being spoken is only a word being made audible. And the Veda is nothing but words. Since words are not destroyed, the Veda is not destroyed. The Veda is eternal.

*[Figure: A chain of boxes: jala leads to pānī, to water, to what one drinks, and a dotted arrow returns to the start: every meaning is another word]*

***The dictionary never leaves the dictionary.** Jala and pānī, extended by one step. Mīmāṃsā wrote whole treatises on the word, far beyond Nyāya, and anyone who wants the grammar of śabda should read them.*

The grammarian Bhartṛhari gives the family resemblance. In the Vākyapadīya, Bhartṛhari takes the same step and keeps walking: only the word has being; meaning is like a cognition, like māyā; the word is Brahman itself, śabda-brahma, and like Brahman it has four states, from the uttered sound in the throat (vaikharī) through two subtler levels (madhyamā, paśyantī) to the formless parā. My teachers did not connect Bhartṛhari to Mīmāṃsā; the bridge is mine, and it should not be overdrawn: Bhartṛhari was a grammarian, and Kumārila in fact attacked his theory of the indivisible word. But both start from the observation that you cannot get out of language by looking up a word, and both conclude that the word, not the thing, is what lasts.

Step 4

### Heard, not written

The second support is that the Veda has no author. The attack it answers is worth quoting in the form my teacher gave it, because it is funny and because the whole of the Cārvāka case is in it. The Veda says that a goat offered in the yajña is released and goes to heaven. "The Cārvākas replied: if a goat sacrificed in a yajña goes to heaven, then sacrifice your father; without having to do any good karma he will go straight to heaven." If priests wrote that, they wrote it to collect fees. So the Veda is pauruṣeya, man-made, and its commands bind nobody.

Mīmāṃsā's answer is to deny the premise. The Veda is śruti, "what was heard." There are mantras that run the world, in which ṛta, the cosmic order, is carried; the ṛṣis did not compose them, they heard them and saw them. A ṛṣi is defined as a mantra-draṣṭā, one who saw the mantra. A text with no author has no author's errors, no author's motives, and no author's fees. Kumārila's arguments for this are, I was warned, "very hard," and his verses are full of them; the modern reader will recognise in them the ancestor of every later Indian argument about testimony and scripture.

**Added from the books.** The "sacrifice your father" verse is one of the Cārvāka fragments preserved in Mādhava's fourteenth-century survey of the schools, the Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha. It is quoted there to be refuted, which is why we have it at all.

Step 5

### What dharma is

With the text secured, the school can define its subject. The definition in Jaimini's second sūtra is *codanā-lakṣaṇo 'rtho dharmaḥ*: dharma is the good marked out by Vedic injunction. My teachers never quote the sūtra cleanly, but they give its sense a dozen times: Veda-vākya is dharma; follow the Vedic sentence letter by letter; where the smṛtis disagree with the Veda, the smṛti passage is useless. Even the Vaiśeṣika definition, "that from which worldly flourishing and the highest good follow," is re-tied to the text: flourishing and the highest good follow from doing what the Veda says.

It is worth being honest about what this costs. Radhakrishnan, as my teacher reports him, admired the firmness and deplored the result: a ready-made dharma "in which there is nowhere any place for intellect, for inspiration, for any stirring in our own mind." And the Buddhists had said it first. Among the ten marks of a fool that my teacher attributes to Dharmakīrti, one is to follow what is written in the Veda without using one's own intellect. The Mīmāṃsakas' reply was not to deny the charge but to change the subject from thought to conduct. Their motto: *ācāra-hīnaṃ na punanti vedāḥ*, "the Vedas do not purify a man without conduct." A man may have read all four Vedas and remain impure if his character is bad. Knowledge, they told the Vedāntins, is cheap; "the jñānī keeps saying jñāna, jñāna, and his conduct is nothing."

What the Veda's sentences can be, as I first learned it, is two things: a vidhi, an injunction, "do this"; and a niṣedha, a prohibition, "do not." The standard Mīmāṃsā scheme has five kinds, and the three that account leaves out matter, because they are how the school handles the parts of the Veda that are not commands.

*[Figure: Five kinds of Vedic sentence: injunction and prohibition, which I was taught, and explanatory praise, mantra and name, which I added from the books]*

***What a Vedic sentence can be.** I was taught the two kinds that command and forbid. The classical scheme adds arthavāda (a passage that praises or explains, authoritative only in support of an injunction), mantra, and nāmadheya. This is what lets the school say that a sentence like "Vāyu is the swiftest" is not a zoological claim but a reason to perform the rite to Vāyu.*

Part three · Knowing and the world

## Six instruments, two tables, one new power

Before the school can say which dharma to follow, it has to say how anything is known at all. One of my teachers calls this jñāna-mīmāṃsā, and says it was the first thing they did.

Step 6

### Six ways of knowing

Pramā is knowledge of what is real; knowledge of the unreal, the school says flatly, is not knowledge. A pramāṇa is a means of getting pramā. Nyāya had counted four means, and the last post walked through them: perception, inference, comparison, and the word. Mīmāṃsā took all four and added two. Each came to me with its own example, and the examples are the best way to remember them.

**Pratyakṣa**, perception, is the direct contact, sannikarṣa, of a sense with its object: the eye with colour, the hand with softness, the ear with sound. The raw deliverances are indeterminate, "data the different senses have gathered separately"; when the mind joins colour, softness and fragrance and gives the bundle a name, gulāb, a rose, the perception is determinate. There are six senses, five outer and the mind, manas, which is "the master of the senses" and also a sense in its own right: who else perceives grief? Yogic perception they say nothing about, and, as my teacher notes, "it looks as if they do not accept it."

**Anumāna**, inference, runs in the same five steps as Nyāya's: there is fire on the hill; because there is smoke; wherever smoke, fire, as in the kitchen; smoke is seen on the hill; therefore fire. One rule makes it work: the general connection needs repeated observation, bhūyo-darśana. "A crow sat on our house and that same day my brother arrived; we cannot make a rule, whenever a crow comes, my brother comes."

**Upamāna**, comparison, is knowing by similarity. You have seen a cow. Someone tells you that in the forest you will meet a nīlgāy, which is like a cow but with different hooves. When you see it, you know it. Yoga says this is only inference; Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya say it is not, because no "wherever" rule is involved, only a resemblance.

**Śabda**, the word, is where Mīmāṃsā wrote most: how letters join into a word, how meaning attaches, and how words expect one another, ākāṅkṣā, so that a sentence is a structure and not a heap.

**Arthāpatti**, postulation, is the first of the two additions. Devadatta grows fatter every month, and all day long we watch him and he eats nothing. Two facts, no visible link. We supply the link by hypothesis: he eats at night. We never saw it; it is not perception. There is no "wherever a man is fat he eats at night"; it is not inference. It is a third thing, and the school counted it.

**Anupalabdhi**, non-apprehension, is the second. "There is no book on the table." How is that known? Not by seeing the book. By not finding it where it would be seen if it were there. Absence, the school argued, needs its own instrument. Prabhākara disagreed and stopped at five; Kumārila took six; and Śaṅkara's Vedānta, as I was told more than once, took all six from here.

*[Figure: Six panels, one per means of knowing, each with the example I learned it by, and below them four rows of dots showing which schools accept which: Nyāya four, Prabhākara five, Kumārila six, Advaita six]*

***Six instruments and who carries them.** The examples are the ones I learned them by: the rose, the hill and the crow, the cow and the nīlgāy, the expectant word, fat Devadatta, the missing book. The tick rows follow the standard counts; the first four, I was told, "Mīmāṃsā took from Nyāya, and there is no difference between them here."*

Step 7

### The parrot and the mynā

After the six, a problem arose "that to this day has not been settled." Whatever we have come to know by any means, did we know it correctly? What certifies a cognition? It is usually told as a story. When Śaṅkara went looking for Maṇḍana Miśra's house in Mithilā, he was told the sign to look for: two cages at the door, a parrot in one and a mynā in the other, debating in Sanskrit. The parrot says *svataḥ pramāṇam*, knowledge is valid of itself; the mynā says *parataḥ pramāṇam*, knowledge is validated by something else. "And this debate has no end; it is that long a debate."

The examples I was given for the mynā's side are good ones. Your eyes report a black shape, this tall, standing at the edge of the forest, and you tell the children not to go that way because a bear is standing there. How do you check? Look again? You have already looked; what more will the eye do? So you apply the intellect: a bear would move, would look about for prey; this thing stands stock still; walk closer. You walk closer and it is a black bush, shaped so that it looked dreadful. And the two buckets: one hand in hot water, one in cold, then both into a bowl of ordinary water, and one hand says hot and the other says cold. Both are senses. Whom do you believe? You need a second cognition to certify the first.

*[Figure: Left, self-validity: a cognition with an arrow looping back to itself. Right, validity from elsewhere: a cognition followed by a second and a third that certify or defeat it. Below, two buckets and a bowl of lukewarm water with contradictory reports]*

***Two theories of certification.** The bear that was a bush and the two buckets are my teacher's. I first learned the sides the other way round, with Nyāya as the parrot and Mīmāṃsā as the mynā; the standard textbook attribution is this: Mīmāṃsā (both schools) and Advaita hold svataḥ prāmāṇya, that a cognition is valid in itself and only its invalidity is learned from outside, while Nyāya holds parataḥ prāmāṇya, that validity is established by a further cognition such as successful action. This page follows the textbooks and flags the disagreement.*

**Why the standard view fits the school.** A school whose whole case rests on a text with no author needs cognitions that do not wait for an external certificate. If Vedic testimony were valid only once confirmed by something else, the something else would outrank the Veda. Self-validity closes that gap: the injunction is authoritative on arrival, and the burden falls on anyone who claims a defeater. That is the position the textbooks give to Kumārila and Prabhākara, and it is the one Advaita inherited along with the six pramāṇas.

Step 8

### What there is: two tables and a power

Mīmāṃsā is a realism, and a plural one. "There is not one reality; there are the thousands of things in the world." The rule I was given for it is a single sentence: call nothing unreal. In a dream an elephant walks on the roof, and as long as the dream lasts nobody can contradict it; the book in front of you is real, and nobody is going to contradict that either. My teacher lets the thought drift toward Vedānta for a moment ("until the soul is elevated, when the book will seem to have been mere paper"), which is his habit, not the school's; Mīmāṃsā's own position, stated a sentence later, is that everything we meet is real and stays real.

Selves are many, one per living being, and the argument is borrowed from Sāṃkhya: if there were one self, your experience would be everyone's, and the elephant would walk in everybody's dream. Each self, in a phrase I nearly missed, is "a closed window," living inside its own experiences and looking out at the same world.

Then the categories, where the two schools diverge. Kumārila counts four positive kinds of thing, taken over from Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika with the numbers adjusted (eleven substances where Vaiśeṣika had nine, twenty-five qualities where it had twenty-four, the same five motions, and universals), and four kinds of absence: the absence of the pot before it is made, its absence after it breaks, the absolute absence of the barren woman's son, and the mutual absence by which the cow is not the horse. Prabhākara rejects the absences and lists eight positive categories: substance, quality, motion, universal, inherence, and three of his own: power (śakti), similarity (sādṛśya, "the thing that makes comparison possible"), and number (saṅkhyā, "without which you cannot count the things of the world at all").

*[Figure: Left, Kumārila's categories: four positive kinds and four absences. Right, Prabhākara's eight, with power, similarity and number highlighted]*

***Two inventories.** Both as I learned them. Two cautions from the books: I was taught that Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika "did not accept" the absences, but absence is in fact their standard seventh category (not in Kaṇāda's original six, but there from the later commentators on); and the inherence in Prabhākara's list is his own looser relation, paratantratā, "dependence," rather than Vaiśeṣika's samavāya.*

The new thing on Prabhākara's list is śakti, and it deserves attention. In the production of an effect from a cause, the power is the crucial term. Wheat gives a crop; roast the wheat in the grain-parcher's kiln and sow it, and nothing comes up. The grain is still there. The power is gone. "People forget śakti and start calling the object the cause. No object is a cause." There is a Western witness too, Leibniz if I caught the name right: those who say the axe is the cause of the tree being cut should bring an axe and lay it by the tree; a month later the tree will still be standing. Until the power in the axe is used, nothing is cut. "In stressing śakti," as it was put to me, "śakti became the mother of the world."

*[Figure: Three panels: an axe lying beside a tree with a calendar, nothing happens; raw grain in soil sprouts; roasted grain in soil, nothing]*

***Śakti.** Two of the examples I learned it by. The grain-parcher's kiln removes nothing you can see and everything that matters.*

Part four · The act

## Apūrva, the word, the map of action, the end

Now the school's own idea, the one that stood beside ṛta and adṛṣṭa at the top of this page as India's name for the moral order. It grows directly out of śakti.

Step 9

### Apūrva: the act keeps its own books

Every act, the Mīmāṃsakas said, has within it the power to produce its effect, and you will receive the effect whether you want it or not. The obvious objection is the one every ethics has to face. A man says: I murdered so-and-so, I was never caught, and today I die in my bed; my act never found its effect. The school's answer is that the effect is deferred, not cancelled; you accept rebirth, and the body will come again into some womb or other, and the fruit will be waiting. Then the better objection: if the fruit comes that late, who keeps it all that time?

The examples I was given here are the ones to remember. You go to the merchant's shop, ask for turmeric, pay, and he hands it over: some acts fruit at once. You plant a jāmun stone and the fruit comes six years later, after you may be dead: the effect was lying in the stone the whole time. Bhīṣma on his bed of arrows looks back ten births through samādhi and sees himself fling a snake onto a thorn tree; those thorns are Arjuna's arrows. Who preserved the fruit for six years, for ten births? Other schools answered: Īśvara, karma-phala-dātā, the giver of the fruit of acts; who else could join an act to a fruit three births away? Mīmāṃsā answered: nobody is needed. The act itself has two powers, the power to produce its effect and the power to preserve it until the time is right. That second power is apūrva, "the unprecedented," the thing that was not there before the act and is there after it. "Even if Īśvara wished, he could not make the jāmun fruit in three years."

*[Figure: A time axis: the act at the start, with apūrva stored beneath it; three fruits arrive at different distances: turmeric now, the jāmun in six years, Bhīṣma's arrows in ten births; a crossed-out box for Īśvara, who cannot change the timing]*

***No bookkeeper.** The three examples are my teacher's. The axis is not to scale; the point is that distance makes no difference to delivery.*

Three consequences follow. First, there is no fate. "Where the fruit is deferred we say, that is fate. There is no fate. Some karma's fruit came late and we did not remember that we had done such a thing in a past life." Second, the system has no God, and does not miss him: because they gave karma such primacy, "they removed Īśvara completely; Īśvara can interfere nowhere." One of my teachers, discussing Yoga, puts it more sharply: "what we call God, they call apūrva." Third, this did not make Mīmāṃsā a heresy, because Śaṅkara had already moved the line. A nāstika, in Śaṅkara's definition, is not one who denies God but one who reviles the Veda. By that test the godless Mīmāṃsakas are the most orthodox people in India.

**Added from the books.** In the texts, apūrva is introduced by Śabara and developed by Kumārila as the "new" unseen result that bridges the rite, which perishes as soon as it is performed, and the fruit, which may come much later; the Bhāṭṭa school locates it in the agent, and Prabhākara speaks instead of the command itself, niyoga. The classic example is not a jāmun stone but the sentence "one who desires heaven should perform the agniṣṭoma." The seed and the fruit are my teacher's way of making the idea visible, and a good one.

Step 10

### The word makes the god

Step 2 ended with a promise: that in restoring the words of the rites, Mīmāṃsā let the gods recede behind the words. Here is how far it went. The school, I was taught, "made śabda itself the devatā." When I say *Indrāya svāhā*, this "Indra" is not a god standing somewhere; it is a word, and whatever image of a deity forms, the word forms it. My teacher builds a three-step scheme out of this (meaning as deity, word-and-meaning as deity, word as deity) which seems to be his own schematisation, and which he states more plainly elsewhere: the devatās are subordinate to the mantras; the mantra, not the god, is the agent. In the texts, Śabara argues the point at length: the deity has no body, does not eat the offering, and is nothing beyond what the mantra names; the fruit comes from the rite, through apūrva. (That last point is my addition, from the books.)

Two practical rules follow. If even one syllable of a mantra goes wrong, "the mantra's meaning becomes something else and it can even do you harm." And a rite performed without the mantras, or by a priest who does not know them, is nothing. There is the Mahābhārata's warning: have your yajña done by a Brāhmaṇa without Veda and it is the same as throwing the oblation in a drain. Pronunciation, not devotion, carries the rite.

The word svāhā closes the circuit. Svāhā means samarpaṇa, dedication. The full formula is *idam Indrāya, na mama*: this is for Indra; this is not mine. Why put it in the fire, if Indra is the one receiving it? Because Agni is the carrier of the gods, the postman: the Veda's first words are *agnim īḷe purohitam*, and the purohita is the one who delivers your message. The fragrance and the airy part of the ghee go up to the addressee; what stays below is ash. "People built the idiom out of the ash": in everyday Hindi, *sab svāhā ho gayā* means it all went up in smoke, it was all wasted. The idiom has the rite exactly backwards. What stays below is the waste. What goes up is the point.

*[Figure: A postal system: the offerer, an envelope addressed with the formula this is Indra's, not mine, Agni as the carrier, the airy part of the offering rising to the addressee Indra, and ash left below with the folk idiom crossed out]*

***Svāhā as a postal system.** Dedication, address, carrier, delivery; and ownership released at the moment the word is spoken. Nityananda Misra describes the same formula as the renunciatory core of every oblation: "we withdraw our sense of ownership from the thing." The usual etymologies of svāhā ("well said," or "well offered") were not given to me by either source; I add them here from the dictionaries.*

Step 11

### The map of action

If the Veda commands and forbids, and every act pays out, then the whole of a life can be sorted. The sorting I learned comes to four kinds of act. Nitya karma is daily and obligatory: the morning bath, sandhyā, dāna, washing the hands before eating. Naimittika karma is tied to an occasion: bathing at Kurukṣetra during a solar eclipse, the naming of a son, his sacred thread. Neither kind binds, "because you did not do them of your own volition"; doing them removes sin and earns merit, and not doing them is a loss. Kāmya karma is done for a wish: a rite for a son, a rite for wealth, a hospital built so that one's merit grows. It works, and it binds, because "there is no karma that does not bear fruit," and a fruit must be enjoyed, which means another birth to enjoy it in. Niṣiddha karma is what the Veda forbids; "not so much bondage as the road to hell."

The sorter below is built from the acts my teachers used as examples. File each one and watch the grid fill. The point it makes is in the two words across the top: the path out runs through the left half only.

Loading the first act.

    

Read the act, then file it. Eight acts, all of them examples I was given; the grid fills as you go.

does not bind binds

#### nityaनित्य

daily and obligatory: bath, sandhyā, dāna

no bondage; sin is shed

#### naimittikaनैमित्तिक

on an occasion: an eclipse, a birth, a thread

no bondage; merit is earned

#### kāmyaकाम्य

for a wish: a son, wealth, heaven

svarga, then another birth to enjoy it

#### niṣiddhaनिषिद्ध

forbidden outright

“not so much bondage as the road to hell”

0 of 8 filed

Two cases show how the school read its prohibitions, and both are uncomfortable. The Veda says the Brāhmaṇa is not to be killed. What, then, if a Brāhmaṇa commits a crime? The Mīmāṃsakas, as I was told it, interpreted: the king should call the full assembly, humiliate the man with the worst insults possible, and expel him; "for a Brāhmaṇa this is worse than death." The Veda says a woman is not to be killed; for her, exclusion from her husband's bed for six years, "a punishment greater than death for a woman." Both were presented to me as examples of the school's thoroughness. A modern reader will notice what they also are: a hierarchy of persons in which the protected classes receive, in place of death, the punishments their protectors thought they would mind most.

There is also a small theory of how a deliberate act is formed, and it is the most modern thing I took from the school. Before you will anything, know your iṣṭa, your goal; most people, my teacher says, never do, and drift "like a cut kite that lands on a rubbish heap." Then know what the goal requires, iṣṭa-sādhana-jñāna, and whether you have it: six hours of study a day, six newspapers. Then know the means you can actually employ, kṛti-sādhana-jñāna: the coaching institute costs 6,000 a month and your father earns 2,000, so drop that goal and set another. Only when all three are in place does cikīrṣā arise, the wish to act: "I will, because I can." Until then, do not will it; "you will fail outright."

**Where my sources disagree.** The account of Yoga I learned from calls the rite for a son "naimittika" and adds a fifth kind, niṣkāma karma, action without desire, which yields no fruit and no bondage; the Mīmāṃsā teaching calls the rite for a son kāmya and uses naimittika for occasion-bound rites. This page follows the Mīmāṃsā account. Expiation, prāyaścitta, came to me only as Kumārila's personal act, never as a category.

Step 12

### The self, and the end

The self in Mīmāṃsā is many, and it is three things at once: knower, enjoyer, and doer. The reason I was given for insisting on the third is a proverb: *khīr khā gaī bāmanī, phāṃsī caṛhā Śekh*, the Brahmin woman ate the pudding and the Sheikh got hanged. Whoever does must be the one who enjoys, or the whole scheme of fruit and act is unjust. The self is not known as an object; "self-consciousness is a self-contradictory term," because it makes two of one. It is experienced, anubhūti, and it becomes aware of itself only in contact with things: "there can be no empty consciousness."

And the end? My teacher is frank that early Mīmāṃsā had none, or rather that its end was svarga: do the rites and enjoy a heaven whose pleasures, unlike earth's, do not perish. Jaimini and Śabara do not discuss liberation. The later school, "when it joined up with Vedānta and with Śaṅkara," borrowed the idea of mokṣa and then gave it a shape of its own, and the shape is the clearest place to see what kind of school this is. Vedānta's liberation is prapañca-vilaya: when knowledge dawns, the manifold world dissolves, "the book was only paper." Mīmāṃsā's is prapañca-sambandha-vilaya: the world stays exactly as it is, and your relation to it dissolves. Three relations, specifically: to the body, the seat of enjoyment; to the senses, its instruments; to objects, its material. None of the three is destroyed. The cords are cut. You reach it not by knowledge but by doing the obligatory and occasional acts, dropping the wishful and the forbidden, and letting the stored fruit run out.

*[Figure: Left, Vedānta: a figure beside a world drawn faintly, which dissolves when knowledge arises. Right, Mīmāṃsā: the same world drawn fully, the figure tied to body, senses and objects by three cords, each cord cut]*

***Two liberations.** The triad of body, senses and objects and the phrase "dissolution of the relation to the world" are as I learned them; the contrast with Vedānta is my teacher's framing. In the texts the fullest statement of this later Mīmāṃsā doctrine of release is in Pārthasārathi Miśra's Śāstradīpikā, around the eleventh century (my addition).*

Part five · The rite as a life

## What the yajña world was, and what is left of it

The argument so far has been about a rite that none of my teachers has seen performed. Two sources describe the thing itself: an article on the history of yajña by the teacher I have leaned on most, and a long conversation with the Sanskrit scholar Nityananda Misra on animal sacrifice in the Vedas.

Step 13

### Two fires, three sevens, and a man between 25 and 40

In the Vedic age, the article says, yajña had the place in religion that breath has in the body. There were two kinds of fire. In the household fire, every married man performed the small cooked-food rites, the pāka-yajñas. In the śrauta fires, the solemn rites were performed by priests, and the article names the hearths: gārhapatya, āhavanīya, dakṣiṇāgni, and the sabhya. The total of household and solemn rites was twenty-one, in three sevens: seven pāka-yajñas, seven havir-yajñas, seven soma-yajñas. Only a man who had formally set up the fires could perform them, and only a married man between twenty-five and forty was entitled to set them up. The Soma rite of the Ṛgveda required thirty-three altars, thirty-three fires, and four chief priests among many; it cost so much in materials and priests' fees that only kings and the rich could sponsor one. The agnihotra, by contrast, was done morning and evening with milk, barley gruel, rice grains, curd and ghee, and was held to be the best means of destroying sin and reaching heaven. Nityananda Misra names all twenty-one from the Gopatha Brāhmaṇa, and notes that even the householder's seven include an animal rite. Many of the great rites were later declared kali-varjya, to be avoided in the present age: the article's list includes the soma rites, the animal rites, the agnihotra, the human and horse sacrifices.

Against that enormous machinery, set what my teacher actually recommends: the five daily yajñas of the householder, which Manu lists and which he reads through Radhakrishnan and his own grandmother. Brahma-yajña, the sacrifice to knowledge: when you buy the two-thousand-rupee sari, buy twenty rupees of books and start a children's library; "we are not producing dogs and cats." Deva-yajña, the return to the powers that give: the farmer toils so that your wheat costs forty rupees and not two hundred; if you are a post-office clerk, see that his son's interview letter arrives on time, "and you have completed deva-yajña." Pitṛ-yajña, the elders: feed them first, bring them home, and put the grandchild in the grandmother's lap, where the child learns to tolerate every later frustration. Manuṣya-yajña, the guest: Rantideva in the famine giving away the last flour dissolved in water, and Manu's rule that the woman who eats what remains after the guest is "equal to a goddess." Bhūta-yajña, the creatures: in one telling, crumbs left on the plate for the crow and the kite that no longer comes; in the other, the household's duty to prosper and to save, so that it never becomes a burden on a poorer house. "Of the twenty-one," he says, "Mīmāṃsā gave the householder these five. They are easy; a man can actually do them."

*[Figure: Two rings. Outer ring: the twenty-one Vedic rites in three arcs of seven, pāka, havir and soma, with the rites forbidden in the Kali age greyed out. Inner ring: the five daily sacrifices of the householder with my teacher's modern glosses. Centre: the three hearths and the age bracket for setting up the fires.]*

***The great system and the one a man can do.** Outer ring: the twenty-one rites as Nityananda Misra lists them from the Gopatha Brāhmaṇa; greyed where the article's kali-varjya list covers them (all the soma rites, the agnihotra, the animal rites), a combination of two sources that neither of them makes. Inner ring: Manu's five daily sacrifices with my teacher's modern glosses. Centre: the three hearths the article names (it adds a fourth, the sabhya) and the age bracket for setting up the fires.*

**Where the two tellings differ.** I have the five from my teacher in two versions, and the order of the five, and the meaning of bhūta-yajña, change between them: ecology in one, prosperity and saving in the other. The test of a prosperous house (ornaments on the women, a cow and a horse at the door) is attributed to Mīmāṃsā and the begging sādhu in one telling and to Manu and the guest in the other. Both readings are his modern glosses, and the page presents them as such. The sari-and-books anecdote comes with different numbers in the two tellings; both attribute it to Radhakrishnan.

Step 13a

### The hard case: the animal on the altar

Nothing I was taught about Mīmāṃsā touched sacrificial killing beyond the Cārvāka joke in Step 4. The conversation with Nityananda Misra does, and it is the most careful hour in everything I worked through. Three positions exist, as the question is framed there: those who deny any killing in the Vedas, those who accept it and say Vedic violence is not violence, and those who accept it and practise it. Misra, who insists on citing a source for every sentence, takes a fourth: read the primary texts. The hymns are only mantras; how they were used is in the Brāhmaṇas, the ritual manuals, "like an aircraft manual." Later authorities, Manu, the epic, Śaṅkara, are secondary sources a thousand years after the rites.

What the manuals say surprised me. Killing happened; "if not, why would the Mahābhārata condemn it, and why would later literature justify it?" But the Vedic texts never say bali, which in Vedic usage means an offering; they say paśubandha, "binding of the animal," or ālambhana, or saṃjñapana, "quieting." The man who did it is the śamitṛ, "the one who quiets." The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa instructs the officiants to turn toward the fire so as not to be eyewitnesses. It forbids striking the head ("that is the human way") or behind the ear ("that belongs to the Fathers"); the mouth is closed and the animal suffocated; there is no blade, which is why, Misra says, no form of slaughter by cutting can claim a Vedic basis. And the same text says of the act, "what they do here is cruel," and prescribes an expiation afterwards, "for we do śānti only for a cruel or sinful act."

Then the story that the manuals tell about themselves. The gods first offered man; the sacrificial essence, the medha, left him and entered the horse; they offered the horse and it entered the bull; then the sheep; then the goat; then it went into the earth, and from the earth into rice and barley. "That is why these are dug out of the earth." And the text concludes that the rice cake, the puroḍāśa, offered by one who knows this has as much potency as all five animals together. The Veda's own manual records its move from killing to substitution. Misra reads the Śunaḥśepa legend the same way, as niṣkrayaṇa, ransom: a man stood in for a prince, an animal for the man, grain for the animal; "the substitute can be anything." The human sacrifice described in the Śatapatha binds four men, one from each class, carries fire around them, and releases them unharmed; a voice says, "do not complete this; if you did, man would eat man." The Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa releases its bound men and wild animals "for the sake of ahiṃsā," the word itself, which Misra takes as the seed of the principle that later became a banyan in the epic, in Jainism and Buddhism, and in Patañjali.

*[Figure: Five silhouettes in a row, man, horse, bull, sheep, goat, with a small flame called medha hopping from each to the next, then diving into the ground and rising as stalks of rice and barley, ending in a cake labelled as potent as all five. Below, three stage directions from the manual]*

***The flight of the medha.** The manual's account of its own move from killing to the cake, with three of its stage directions. Everything in this figure is from Misra's account; my Mīmāṃsā sources do not touch it.*

Three later responses close the circle. The epic, in Bhīṣma's mouth, says that liquor, meat and the rest "were introduced into yajña by rogues; it is not enjoined in the Vedas." The Cārvāka says: then sacrifice your father. And the orthodox commentators, Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja among them, say *vaidikī hiṃsā hiṃsā na bhavati*, Vedic violence is not violence, a maxim Misra calls post-Vedic and declines to accept. It is worth noticing that the word "rogues" appears on both sides: the epic uses it to purge the rite from inside, the Cārvāka to abolish it from outside.

**My addition, from the books.** That last maxim is where Mīmāṃsā's own method would come in, and none of my sources covers it. The school's rule is that a specific injunction overrides a general prohibition: "do no harm to any being" is general, "offer the animal at the agniṣṭoma" is specific, so the second governs within its scope. Śaṅkara's discussion of why the Veda's ban on harm does not cancel its command to sacrifice is in his commentary on Brahma Sūtra 3.1.25, which matches the citation given in the conversation, and Manu's chapter five argues that the killing in yajña is not killing at all. The puroḍāśa passage and the "a yajña produces its fruit by itself" line in the article are the same idea as apūrva seen from the Brāhmaṇa side; Misra never names Mīmāṃsā, Jaimini or apūrva.

Step 14

### The verdict, and the longer story

Three verdicts, then. Radhakrishnan: a code of ritual, not a philosophy, because it never asks what the ultimate truth is or what the self's destination is. Max Müller, as my teacher paraphrases him: necessary, because Hindus do not know their own ceremonies, and without Mīmāṃsā nobody would. My teacher's own: unique, because no other system made dharma, karma and conduct cohere, because all of Hindu practice from birth to death still draws its procedures from it, and because without the Mīmāṃsakas it would have been very hard to re-establish the Veda after the Buddhists, the Jains and the Cārvākas had uprooted it. He ends with a Vedic prayer, *ṛtasya pathā preta*, "lead us along the path of ṛta," and with the sentence he calls the foundation of Indian culture: the Vedas do not purify a man without conduct.

And then there is the longer story, which his own article tells against him. The school built to save yajña won its argument and lost its world. Indifference to the rite began in the Vedic age itself; the Āraṇyakas turned it into reflection; the Upaniṣads put knowledge first; the Buddha built a path with no yajña in it. Śaṅkara, with Kumārila and Maṇḍana beside him, restored the Veda's prestige and still gave no place to yajña among the qualifications for knowledge, because "what is eternal cannot be the fruit of any action." Then came bhakti: the sūtras of Śāṇḍilya and Nārada, the Ālvārs, Rāmānuja and surrender, Rāmānanda carrying it north in the people's languages so that it would not "stay confined to the sacrificial halls and the monasteries," Kabīr, and Tulsī, who says again and again that in this age yoga, yajña and knowledge are all fruitless and the one support is the name. The article's own title is a line of his: *kalijug jog na jagya na gyānā*.

*[Figure: A timeline from the age of fire sacrifice through the Āraṇyakas, the Upaniṣads, the Buddha, the restoration under Kumārila, Maṇḍana and Śaṅkara, the bhakti sūtras, the Ālvārs and Rāmānuja, Rāmānanda, and Kabīr and Tulsī; Mīmāṃsā is flagged as the defence of the first station]*

***From the altar to the name.** The stations and dates are the article's; Rāmānuja's traditional dates are 1017 to 1137 and "1073" is not a standard milestone, and Rāmānanda's birth is given as 1299 by his tradition and as around 1400 by many historians (my addition). The article is by the same teacher, writing as a reader of Tulsī rather than as a Mīmāṃsaka.*

That is the shape of the thing. A system that answers the question "how do we know the Veda is right?" so thoroughly that its answers outlive the practice they were built to protect. The six means of knowing went to Vedānta. The theory that an act stores its own consequence went everywhere. The rules for reading an injunction became the backbone of Hindu law. And the twenty-one rites shrank, in my teacher's hands, to five things a householder can do before breakfast, which is perhaps what Mīmāṃsā would have wanted: not that you believe anything in particular, but that you act, exactly as written, and let the act keep its own books.

In one piece

## The argument, start to finish

1.  Mīmāṃsā means close inquiry; its subject is the earlier portion of the Veda, the injunctions. Jaimini's first sūtra: now, the inquiry into dharma. Vedānta's: now, the inquiry into Brahman.
2.  It arose because the rite was losing: Cārvākas, Jains and Buddhists had mocked it and out-argued its defenders. The woman on the roof; Kumārila among the Buddhists; the legend as the tradition remembers the stakes.
3.  Three jobs: prove the Veda eternal, prove it authorless, restore the procedures. The third turned the school into a ritual manual and pushed the gods behind the words.
4.  The word is eternal because every meaning is another word; the Veda is word; so the Veda is eternal. Jala, pānī, water. Bhartṛhari went one step further and made the word Brahman.
5.  The Veda is heard, not written; a text with no author has no errors and no motives. The ṛṣi is one who saw the mantra. The Cārvāka's father goes unsacrificed.
6.  Dharma is what the injunction marks out; conduct, not thought, is the test. Radhakrishnan: no room for intellect. The school: the Vedas do not purify a man without conduct.
7.  Six means of knowing, including postulation and non-apprehension; and cognitions certify themselves. Fat Devadatta eats at night; there is no book on the table. The parrot and the mynā are still arguing.
8.  The world is real and plural; selves are many; and power, śakti, is the real cause inside every thing. Roasted wheat does not sprout. The axe beside the tree cuts nothing.
9.  Every act carries the power to produce its fruit and to store it; that stored power is apūrva. Turmeric now, the jāmun in six years, Bhīṣma in ten births. No God is needed to keep the books.
10.  The deity is what the mantra names; the syllable, not the devotion, carries the rite. Idam Indrāya, na mama: dedicated, addressed, carried by Agni. The ash is the residue, not the point.
11.  Acts sort into four: obligatory and occasional do not bind; wishful and forbidden do. Release is the dissolving of one's relation to body, senses and objects, while the world stays as it is.
12.  The rite itself was a vast, costly, sometimes bloody institution whose own manuals record its move from killing to the cake; what survives of it is five things a householder can do. The school won its argument and lost its world, first to knowledge, then to the name.

Terms

## Glossary

The school and the text

मीमांसा *mīmāṃsā*

Inquiry, critical analysis; "the analysis of anything is called its mīmāṃsā."

पूर्व · उत्तर मीमांसा *pūrva · uttara mīmāṃsā*

The inquiry into the earlier, ritual portion of the Veda (Jaimini) and into the later, knowledge portion (Vedānta).

अथातो धर्मजिज्ञासा *athāto dharma-jijñāsā*

"Now, therefore, the inquiry into dharma"; Jaimini's opening sūtra.

चोदनालक्षणोऽर्थो धर्मः *codanā-lakṣaṇo 'rtho dharmaḥ*

"Dharma is the good marked out by injunction"; the second sūtra, usually paraphrased as "Veda-vākya is dharma."

अपौरुषेय *apauruṣeya*

Not composed by any person; said of the Veda, hence errorless.

श्रुति · मन्त्रद्रष्टा *śruti · mantra-draṣṭā*

"What was heard"; and the ṛṣi as "one who saw the mantra."

कर्मकाण्ड · ज्ञानकाण्ड *karma-kāṇḍa · jñāna-kāṇḍa*

The ritual and the knowledge portions of the Veda.

विधि · निषेध · अर्थवाद *vidhi · niṣedha · arthavāda*

Injunction, prohibition, and (my addition) explanatory praise that serves an injunction.

भाट्ट · प्राभाकर (गुरुमत) *Bhāṭṭa · Prābhākara (Guru-mata)*

The schools of Kumārila and of Prabhākara; Murāri's is the minor third.

शाबरभाष्य · श्लोकवार्त्तिक *Śābara-bhāṣya · Ślokavārttika*

Śabara's commentary on Jaimini; Kumārila's verse commentary on its first part.

The word

शब्द · अर्थ *śabda · artha*

Word and meaning; the word is primary and eternal, "the meaning of a word is itself a word."

आकाङ्क्षा *ākāṅkṣā*

Expectancy: the way one word in a sentence calls for the next.

शब्दब्रह्म *śabda-brahma*

Bhartṛhari's thesis that the word is Brahman, with four levels of speech from the uttered to the formless.

स्वाहा *svāhā*

The word of dedication at each oblation; samarpaṇa.

इदम् इन्द्राय न मम *idam Indrāya na mama*

"This is for Indra, not mine"; the renouncing formula of the offering.

हव्य · वाहक *havya · vāhaka*

The oblation to be given to the gods; and Agni as its carrier, "the postman."

Knowing

प्रमा · प्रमाण *pramā · pramāṇa*

Knowledge of a real object; and a means of getting it.

प्रत्यक्ष · सन्निकर्ष *pratyakṣa · sannikarṣa*

Perception; the sense-object contact that makes it.

अनुमान · व्याप्ति · भूयोदर्शन *anumāna · vyāpti · bhūyo-darśana*

Inference; the pervasion it rests on; the repeated observation that establishes the pervasion.

उपमान · सादृश्य *upamāna · sādṛśya*

Comparison; similarity, which Prabhākara makes a category.

अर्थापत्ति *arthāpatti*

Postulation; the hypothesis that links two seen facts.

अनुपलब्धि *anupalabdhi*

Non-apprehension; the means by which absence is known.

स्वतः · परतः प्रामाण्य *svataḥ · parataḥ prāmāṇya*

Validity of a cognition from itself, or from a further cognition; the parrot and the mynā.

मनस् *manas*

The mind as inner sense, "master of the senses," which perceives grief.

The world

पदार्थ *padārtha*

A category of the real; Kumārila counts four positive and four absences, Prabhākara eight positive.

अभाव *abhāva*

Absence: prior, posterior, absolute, mutual; the unmade pot, the broken pot, the barren woman's son, the cow that is not the horse.

शक्ति *śakti*

Power; the real cause within a thing; "the mother of the world."

संख्या *saṅkhyā*

Number; a category for Prabhākara.

आत्मा · अनुभूति *ātman · anubhūti*

The self, many, knower and enjoyer and doer; known by direct experience, not as an object.

The act

अपूर्व *apūrva*

The unseen power an act leaves behind, which stores and later delivers its fruit; "what others call God."

अदृष्ट · ऋत *adṛṣṭa · ṛta*

Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika's and the Ṛgveda's names for the same moral order.

कर्मफलदाता *karma-phala-dātā*

God as giver of the fruit of acts; the role Mīmāṃsā abolished.

नास्तिक *nāstika*

In Śaṅkara's definition, one who reviles the Veda, not one who denies God.

नित्य · नैमित्तिक · काम्य · निषिद्ध *nitya · naimittika · kāmya · niṣiddha*

Obligatory, occasional, wishful, forbidden; the first two do not bind.

इष्ट · चिकीर्षा *iṣṭa · cikīrṣā*

One's goal; and the wish to act that should arise only when the means are known: "I will, because I can."

आचारहीनं न पुनन्ति वेदाः *ācāra-hīnaṃ na punanti vedāḥ*

"The Vedas do not purify a man without conduct" (Vasiṣṭha Dharmasūtra 6.3, not the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra; my addition).

स्वर्ग · अपवर्ग · मोक्ष *svarga · apavarga · mokṣa*

Heaven, the early aim; release, the later one.

प्रपञ्चसम्बन्धविलय *prapañca-sambandha-vilaya*

The dissolution of one's relation to the world (Mīmāṃsā), as against Vedānta's dissolution of the world.

भोगायतन · भोगसाधन · भोग्यविषय *bhogāyatana · bhoga-sādhana · bhogya-viṣaya*

Body, senses, objects: the three relations that release cuts.

The rite

यज्ञ · याग · हवन · होम *yajña · yāga · havana · homa*

Four rites I was taught Mīmāṃsā keeps distinct; "yajña means sacrifice of one's own pleasure."

पाक · हविर् · सोमयज्ञ *pāka · havir · soma-yajña*

The three sevens that make the twenty-one rites.

अग्निहोत्र · अग्निष्टोम *agnihotra · agniṣṭoma*

The twice-daily fire offering; and the Soma rite whose performer "surely attains svarga."

गार्हपत्य · आहवनीय · दक्षिणाग्नि *gārhapatya · āhavanīya · dakṣiṇāgni*

The śrauta hearths; the article adds the sabhya.

अग्न्याधान *agnyādhāna*

Setting up the sacred fires; open, by the article, to a married man of 25 to 40.

कलिवर्ज्य *kali-varjya*

Rites to be avoided in the Kali age.

पञ्चमहायज्ञ *pañca-mahāyajña*

The householder's five: to knowledge, to the gods, to the elders, to the guest, to the creatures.

अतिथिशेष *atithi-śeṣa*

What remains after the guest has eaten; Manu's goddess-like woman eats only that.

पशुबन्ध · आलम्भन · संज्ञपन *paśubandha · ālambhana · saṃjñapana*

The Brāhmaṇas' words for the animal rite: binding, taking hold of, quieting.

शमितृ *śamitṛ*

"The one who quiets"; the man who kills the animal, never called a killer.

मेध · पुरोडाश *medha · puroḍāśa*

The sacrificial essence that migrated from man to grain; and the cake offered in the animal's place.

निष्क्रयण *niṣkrayaṇa*

Ransom, substitution; Misra's reading of Śunaḥśepa and of the whole sequence.

वैदिकी हिंसा हिंसा न भवति *vaidikī hiṃsā hiṃsā na bhavati*

"Vedic violence is not violence"; the later orthodox maxim, which Misra calls post-Vedic.

A note, and sources

**I am a compiler, not an authority.** This page is my learning, set down in the order it made sense to me. Mīmāṃsā was the hardest of the six to gather, because what I could find on it was scattered across many short pieces that sometimes contradict each other. Where I have added a date, a name or a standard reading that my teachers did not give (the hagiographic sources of the Kumārila legend, the textbook attribution of self-validity, the fivefold division of Vedic sentences, the textual home of apūrva and of the later doctrine of release, the rule that a specific injunction overrides a general prohibition, the dates), the text says so in place, and where my sources disagree with each other or with the textbooks, I have noted the disagreement rather than smoothed it over. Every diagram is my own.

**The lectures I learned from.** From The Quest, Dr. Himmat Singh Sinha's YouTube channel: [Darshan Ya Karma Shastra: Mimamsa Darshan Explained (01)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdgmrM07dyM) (12 min), [Mimamsa Ka Aahvan: Vedon Ki Or Wapsi (02)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8gOqnwUuPA) (7 min), [Kya Veda Nitya Aur Svatah Praman Hain? (03)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi5KW69oe2c) (24 min), the three-part [मीमांसा दर्शन विस्तृत विश्लेषण](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRsuUm3jt-U) (part 1, 45 min, a compilation of the first three "Explained" talks; [part 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GfocFgfRQ0), 30 min; [part 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcD5vFwG1k), 27 min), [मीमांसा दर्शन की सरल और व्यावहारिक व्याख्या](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez5bCOCbaSQ) (13 min), [Grihasth ka Moksh: Panch Yagya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDJSPSH2xpA) (7 min), [यज्ञ में स्वाहा के मायने](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MsFTz4nUMo) (3 min), [भर्तृहरि का शब्द-ब्रह्म दर्शन (1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC06y2_sMiQ) (5 min), the narrated article [Kalijug: Na Yog, Na Yagya, Na Gyaan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXTm8pEZZoM) (18 min), the Mīmāṃsā segment of [योग दर्शन में मोक्ष की अवधारणा](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ivCF181_qc) (14 min), and the two English [introductions to the six Indian philosophical schools](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzLkeQgFFVQ). From Hyper Quest, Vishal Chaurasia's channel: the podcast [यज्ञों में क्यों दी जाती थी बलि: Human and Animal Sacrifice in the Vedas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLptf5gFZU8) with the Sanskrit scholar Nityananda Misra (76 min). The lectures are in Hindi and English; the ideas are restated here in my own words.

**Texts and books these lectures draw on.** Primary texts: Jaimini, *Mīmāṃsā Sūtra*, with Śabara's *Bhāṣya*, tr. Ganganatha Jha (Gaekwad's Oriental Series, 1933 to 1936); Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, *Ślokavārttika*, tr. Ganganatha Jha (1907), and *Tantravārttika*; Pārthasārathi Miśra, *Śāstradīpikā*; Patañjali, *Mahābhāṣya*, on the primacy of the word; Bhartṛhari, *Vākyapadīya*; Bādarāyaṇa, *Brahma Sūtra*, with Śaṅkara's *Bhāṣya*, tr. George Thibaut, *The Vedānta Sūtras* (Sacred Books of the East 34 and 38, 1890 and 1896); Mādhava, *Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha*, tr. E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (1882), for the Cārvāka verses; Mādhava (attributed), *Śaṅkaradigvijaya*, for the legends of Kumārila and Maṇḍana; Manu, *Manusmṛti*; the Dharmasūtras of Gautama and Vasiṣṭha; the Ṛgveda and the Yajurveda; the Śatapatha, Aitareya, Taittirīya and Gopatha Brāhmaṇas; the *Mahābhārata*; the *Bhāgavata Purāṇa*, for Rantideva; Tulsīdās, *Rāmacaritamānas*. Modern studies and translations: S. Radhakrishnan, *Indian Philosophy*, vol. 2 (1927), the chapter on Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, and *The Hindu View of Life* (1927); F. Max Müller, *India: What Can It Teach Us?* (1883) and *The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy* (1899); P. V. Kane, *History of Dharmaśāstra* (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930 to 1962), vol. 3 for the kali-varjya lists; M. Hiriyanna, *Outlines of Indian Philosophy* (1932) and S. Chatterjee and D. Datta, *An Introduction to Indian Philosophy* (1939), the standard accounts I have called "the textbooks" above; F. R. Allchin (ed.), *The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia* (1995) and G. U. Thite, *Sacrifice in the Brāhmaṇa Texts* (1975), both cited by Nityananda Misra on the archaeology and the manuals of the rite.

All diagrams on this page are my own.

In this series

-   [**Sāṃkhya** 1 of 6 The clay before the pot](/darsana/samkhya)
-   [**Yoga** 2 of 6 A road out of the clay](/darsana/yoga)
-   [**Nyāya** 3 of 6 Where there is smoke](/darsana/nyaya)
-   [**Vaiśeṣika** 4 of 6 An inventory of everything](/darsana/vaisheshika)
-   [**Vedānta** 6 of 6 The seer who saw both](/darsana/vedanta)

[All six, in order](/darsana)

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https://emergence.live/darsana/mimamsa