Purva Mimamsa

Purva Mimamsa opens with one of the most quoted lines in Indian philosophy: athato dharma jijnasa, now therefore the inquiry into dharma. Jaimini's Mimamsa Sutra sets the school's whole agenda in that sentence. Dharma, for Mimamsa, is a specific, knowable set of duties, above all the Vedic sacrifices, and the school works out exactly what those duties require and why the instructions that specify them are authoritative.

The authority question is the hard one. A Mimamsaka cannot say the Veda is reliable because a trustworthy person composed it, since the school holds the Veda has no human or divine author at all, apaurusheya, and no beginning in time. Instead Mimamsa built a theory of language and testimony, shabda, to explain how words carry binding authority on their own, focused above all on the injunctive form, vidhi, the grammatical shape of a command.

That focus produced apurva, the unseen potency a properly performed ritual generates and stores until it ripens into its promised result, sometimes long after the rite is finished, Mimamsa's way of explaining how an action can have consequences not immediately observable.

Two commentators, both active in the seventh century, shaped how later readers understood all this. Kumarila Bhatta and Prabhakara agree on the school's basic commitments but disagree on how a cognition certifies its own reliability, and their disagreement split later Mimamsa into two named sub-traditions. Later tradition reads Purva Mimamsa as the necessary first half of a two part inquiry, with Uttara Mimamsa, better known as Vedanta, taking up the Upanishads once the ritual Veda has been accounted for.

Purva Mimamsa is unusual among schools this atlas classifies as religious philosophy for holding, consistently and on principle, that no creator god exists, a position the school did not arrive at reluctantly but built directly into its account of what makes the Veda authoritative in the first place. If the Veda had been composed by any author, human or divine, its authority would depend on that author's reliability, a fact that would then need establishing by some further evidence, and Mimamsa held that no such evidence exists and no such author is needed: the Veda is apaurusheya, without an author, eternal and self existent, so its injunctions carry authority simply as language correctly understood, with no composer standing behind them to vouch for what they say. A creator god who designed and produced the world was, on the same grounds, an unnecessary and unproven addition: the world's order could be explained, Mimamsa argued, by the eternal, self executing operation of ritual action and its unseen fruit, apurva, without invoking a divine agent to set it running or keep it running. Later Vedantins, building on the Upanishads Mimamsa left for the second half of the inquiry to address, generally did affirm a supreme reality, though not always a creator god in the familiar sense either, which makes Purva Mimamsa's flat denial one of the more striking positions in classical Indian religious thought: an elaborate, technically sophisticated system of ritual obligation, taken as binding and eternally authoritative, resting on no divine author, no divine creator and no divine judge anywhere in its architecture.