Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā: Action, the Sacred Texts and the End of Action

Abstract

The Mimāmsā school, which builds its views around an exegesis of the rituals and injunctions of the sacred and supposedly revealed texts, the Vedas, denies the possibility of any ultimate experience. At the outset, in the seminal aphorisms of Jaimini (c 200 BCE), indeed, there is no concern for liberation at all. The correct understanding of injunctions to actions found in the Vedas and the precise formulations of the nature of the rituals, which provide the concrete manifestation of those actions, occupy him completely. In Śabara’s commentary (third century) on Jaimini, (the first extant) the stirrings of transcendental theorising—speculation of what must be the case in reality for the sacred texts to say what they do—are found. Only with Kumārila Bhāṭṭa (sixth-seventh centuries) do we find a well-developed metaphysics presented as the foundation for the theory of ritual action. Meanwhile, another cornmentarial sub-school contemporary to Kumārila is founded by Prabhākara, which apparently strives to go back to a more austere study of ritual shorn of metaphysical commitments (although it does not always succeed in doing so). Since the present essay is concerned with liberation and the role of inquiry in its attainment, Kumārila Bhāṭṭa and his sub-tradition (the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāmsā, represented most significantly and faithfully by Pārthasārathi Miśra (eleventh century)) are more important than earlier and other writers.