Mimamsa

Pūrva Mīmāṃsā — "earlier inquiry," to distinguish it from Vedānta, the "later inquiry" — is the school of Vedic hermeneutics, devoted to the interpretation of the ritual portions of the Veda (the Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas). Founded by Jaimini in the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras around the 3rd century BCE, it is in some respects the most distinctively Hindu of the darshanas. Where the others can be presented as universal philosophical systems, Mīmāṃsā is unabashedly Vedic, taking the eternal authority of the Veda as its non-negotiable starting point.

Mīmāṃsā's project is dual. Practically, it is to produce reliable rules for interpreting Vedic injunctions (vidhi) — for determining, given the often elliptical and contradictory ritual texts, exactly what the householder must do, when, with what materials, and for what end. Philosophically, it is to defend the cognitive authority of the Veda itself: to show that the Veda is apauruṣeya — not authored by any person, human or divine — and therefore free from the defects of all other testimony.

The school divides classically into two sub-traditions, named for their founders Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara Miśra (both c. 7th century CE). Kumārila's school is realist and accommodates Hindu theism more easily; Prabhākara's is famously austere, holding that consciousness is always self-revealing and that we never know an object without simultaneously knowing the self that knows it.

Dharma — the moral and ritual order of the cosmos — is known only through the Veda, and the Veda is eternal, authorless, and infallible. By performing the actions the Veda enjoins, with proper understanding and intent, the agent generates apūrva — a subtle unseen potency that ripens, in due course, into the desired fruit, including svarga (heaven). The Veda is thus not a description of what is, but a prescription of what to do; its core is action (karma), and its authority lies in the unique power of its injunctions.

Mīmāṃsā's hermeneutic method became the framework within which all subsequent Hindu thought interpreted scripture — including Vedānta, which built on Mīmāṃsā's exegetical principles even while reorienting them toward the Upaniṣads rather than the ritual portions. The Dharmaśāstras (legal texts) draw on Mīmāṃsā for their theory of how Vedic injunctions translate into binding social rules.

Mīmāṃsā also forced every other Indian school to take a position on the authority of the Veda. Buddhists and Cārvākas defined themselves against it; Vedānta defined itself with it; Nyāya proposed God as the Veda's author against Mīmāṃsā's apauruṣeya doctrine. The intellectual culture of classical India is unimaginable without Mīmāṃsā's pressure on the question of what the Veda is.

Mīmāṃsā is the least globally visible of the darshanas, partly because its ritualism is alien to modern sensibilities, but partly because its actual concerns — the philosophy of language, the analysis of imperatives, the relation between texts and actions — are unfashionable in today's spiritual marketplace. Yet its sophisticated theory of language has attracted attention from contemporary philosophers; Mīmāṃsā anticipates much of 20th-century philosophy of language, sometimes with greater precision.

For practitioners of Vedic ritual today — the Smārta brāhmaṇas who maintain the daily and seasonal observances — Mīmāṃsā remains the operating manual. To know how to perform the Agnihotra correctly is, in the end, to read Mīmāṃsā.