Mimamsa, sometimes called Purva Mimamsa to distinguish it from the later Uttara Mimamsa, better known as Vedanta, began with a narrower and more technical concern than most of the other darshanas: correctly interpreting the Vedic injunctions governing ritual, resolving apparent contradictions between different ritual instructions, and determining precisely what a given Vedic passage was commanding a practitioner to do. This started as an interpretive discipline, closer to legal hermeneutics than to metaphysics, and grew, through the rigour it demanded, into one of Indian philosophy’s most sophisticated theories of language and meaning.
Mimamsa’s central claim about language connects directly to the earlier discussion in this series of the Vedas as apaurusheya, without a personal author: if the Vedas have no author, their meaning cannot be secured by appeal to what an author intended, the way meaning is normally established for ordinary human speech. Mimamsa’s response was to argue that the connection between a word and its meaning is itself eternal and fixed, not established by convention or by an author’s choice, which allows Vedic injunctions to carry a determinate, binding meaning without needing anyone, human or divine, to have originally meant it.
This theory of eternal word-meaning connection put Mimamsa in direct and lasting dialogue with the grammatical tradition discussed earlier in this series through Panini, and with the specific debate over how a sentence’s meaning emerges from its individual sounds, examined elsewhere in this series as the sphota controversy. Mimamsa’s insistence on treating ritual injunctions as carrying binding, action-guiding force independent of any external authority also gave the school a distinctive and largely non-theistic character among the six darshanas, more concerned with correct action than with the nature of a personal god.
Mimamsa’s narrow original purpose, correctly following ritual instructions, produced, almost as a byproduct, philosophical tools sophisticated enough to shape debates about language and meaning across the entire tradition for centuries. Not every school working within this broad philosophical culture accepted its premises, however, and the sharpest disagreements came not from variations within the six orthodox darshanas but from traditions that rejected the Vedas’ authority altogether, the subject this series turns to next.
Part 31 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
Series II: To the EternalThe Five KoshasIndexFAQThe Timeline