One of the six schools of traditional
Hindu philosophy, most commonly
referred to simply as Mimamsa (“investigation”); it was given the name Purva
Mimamsa to distinguish it from the
Uttara (“Later”) Mimamsa school, better
known as Vedanta. The Mimamsa
school’s name is quite apt, for it emphasizes the investigation of dharma
(“righteous action”), particularly as
revealed in the Vedas, the earliest and
most authoritative Hindu religious texts.
Mimamsas affirmed that the Vedas were
the source of perfect knowledge, and
believed that the Vedas had not been
composed either by God or by human
beings but were rather simply heard
by the ancient sages through their
advanced powers of perception, and
then transmitted orally from generation
to generation.
Since they accepted the Vedas as the
primary source of authority and assumed
that the Vedas contained codes and prescriptions pertaining to dharma, the
Mimamsas then developed complex
rules for textual interpretation to discern these, and it is for these rules that
they are best known. Mimamsas
believed in the existence of the soul and
in the necessary connection of actions
with their results inherent in the notion
of karma—two ideas attested to in the
Vedas. In cases where the result of an
action comes some time after the act, the
Mimamsas believed that the result existed
as an unseen force called apurva. This
force would invariably bring on the result,
thus maintaining the Vedic truth. The
Mimamsas were less unified on the existence of God. Jaimini (4th c. B.C.E.?), the
author of the Mimamsa Sutras and the
founder of the school, seems to ignore the
issue completely, and 1,000 years later
another Mimamsa luminary, Kumarila,
argued against the existence of God.
Aside from developing methods for
interpreting the Vedas, Mimamsas also
contributed to logic and epistemology.
One of their notable contributions was
postulating two new pramanas, which
are the means by which human beings
can gain true and accurate knowledge.
All the philosophical schools accepted
perception (pratyaksha) as a pramana,
and most also accepted inference (anumana) and authoritative testimony
(shabda). The two new modes developed by the Mimamsas were “presumption” (arthapatti) and “knowledge from
absence” (abhava). The Mimamsas justified these additions by claiming that
they accounted for knowledge that
could not be subsumed under the existing pramanas. Arthapatti is an inference
from circumstance, in which a judgment is made about one case based
solely on similarities to related cases. An
537
Purva (“Earlier”) Mimamsa
example would be the presumption that
a traveler had reached his or her destination after the train’s arrival time had
passed. According to Indian philosophy,
this is not a true inference, since the latter must always be confirmed by direct
perception. In the same way, abhava or
the perception of any absence (e.g., the
absence of some object before one)
could not be accounted for by any of
the existing pramanas, and thus
required this new one to explain it.
Aside from Jaimini, the two most significant figures among the Mimamsas
are Kumarila and Prabhakara, who
both lived in the seventh century. For
further information see Karl H. Potter,
Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies,
1972; and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and
Charles A. Moore (eds.), A Sourcebook in
Indian Philosophy, 1957.