The Mitākṣarā, or The Epitome of the Law, by the twelfth-century Sanskrit author Vijñāneśvara is, along with the second-century text the Laws of Manu (Mānava-dharmaśāstra), one of the two most influential works of classical Hindu law. Its subject is dharma, legal and religious duty, which Olivelle has described as “the most central feature of Indian civilization down the centuries, irrespective of linguistic, sectarian, or regional differences” (Dharma, Motilal, 2009- vii). As the premier synthesis of dharma, it thus represents a watershed moment not only in the history of Sanskrit legal and religious thought but also in the intellectual history of India generally. Its genius lies in the clarity and precision of its explanations and in its creative synthesis of earlier jurisprudential thought. Widely disseminated, translated or summarized into several vernacular languages, and elaborated in many subcommentaries, the Mitākṣarā exerted an unparalleled influence on legal thought in medieval and early modern India.
Its author, Vijñāneśvara was also known as Vijñānayogin. About Vijñāneśvara’s life, we know only what the colophons to the many surviving manuscripts tell us. He was the son of a teacher named Padmanābha-bhaṭṭa, belonged to the vedic lineage (gotra) of the sage Bharadvāja, and was a student of Uttama. He seems to have served at the court of king Vikramāditya VI (d. 1127 CE) of the Cālukya dynasty and perhaps lived in its capital city of Kalyāṇa, today’s Basavakalyan in northeastern Karnataka.
He wrote his masterpiece on dharma the form of a commentary on the Laws of Yājñavalkya, an earlier treatise on dharma from the fourth or fifth century CE (see Olivelle, A Treatise on Dharma, Harvard, 2019). This commentary, however, ranges far beyond its source text, authoritatively citing scores of other dharma texts and offering sometimes elaborate new discussions of particular topics. P.V. Kane, the great historian of the Dharmaśāstra genre, likens the significance of the Mitākṣarā “to that of the Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali in grammar or to that of the Kāvyaprakāśa of Mammaṭa in poetics” (History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. 1, 599).