Jaimini

Key ideas

1. Dharma is what injunction points to. Sūtra I.1.2 defines dharma, duty or right action, as the object marked out by a Vedic command (codanā). What one ought to do in sacrifice is known from the injunction, not from observation.
2. Perception cannot reach dharma. Perception tells us about things that already exist, so it cannot show what is to be done. Only the Veda can, and the Sūtra treats it as needing no support from outside.
3. Word and meaning are eternally connected. In I.1.5 the connection between a word and its meaning is held to be eternal, and with it the Veda’s independence of any other support. Later Mīmāṃsakas drew the conclusion that the Veda has no author, human or divine, and is self-validating.
4. A method for reading the Veda. Much of the Sūtra sets rules for deciding which passages command, which merely praise or explain, and how the parts of a rite combine into principal and subordinate acts. This is a theory of interpretation as much as a philosophy.
5. Apūrva. A rite performed now yields its fruit later through an invisible effect, apūrva. The principal rite produces it, and the subordinate acts share in it.
6. Rites. The school is non-theistic: it makes the performance of Vedic rites central to dharma and shows little interest in proving a creator God. Its later thinkers rejected the Nyāya argument that God authored the Veda.

Jaimini is the ancient Indian sage to whom tradition ascribes the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra and so the founding of Mīmāṃsā (mīmāṃsā, “reflection” or “critical investigation”). The school is also called Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, “earlier” investigation, because it studies the earlier, ritual part of the Veda, and Karma Mīmāṃsā, for its subject, ritual action. It asks what dharma, duty, is and how we can know it, and it built a detailed method for reading the Vedic texts.

Who was Jaimini?

Little can be said. Tradition makes him the son of Parāśara and a pupil of the sage Vyāsa, who is said to have taught him the Sāmaveda. Some accounts name Bādarāyaṇa, the author of the Brahma Sūtras, as his teacher. What the texts show is that each cites the other. The Mīmāṃsā Sūtra invokes Bādarāyaṇa’s opinion in I.1.5, and the Brahma Sūtras give Jaimini’s opinion again and again; Rāmānuja’s commentary on them, in Thibaut’s translation, introduces him as “the teacher Jaimini”.

The date of the Sūtra is uncertain: Wikipedia gives 300–200 BCE, while the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the first century CE. The earliest commentary that survives, Śabara’s, covers all twelve chapters and belongs to the early centuries CE. The two great commentators Kumārila and Prabhākara belong to about the seventh century.

What is dharma?

The second sūtra defines it: codanā-lakṣaṇo ‘rtho dharmaḥ. Sandal translates it as “The duty is an object distinguished by a command”, and Cowell and Gough, in their version of Mādhava’s summary, as “Duty is a thing which is to be recognised by an instigatory passage”. Dharma is what Vedic injunction points to.

Why only the Veda? Sandal’s commentary on the fourth sūtra explains that perception concerns what already exists, so it is no cause of knowledge of duty. The fifth says that the connection between a word and its meaning is eternal, and that the Veda is authoritative, in Bādarāyaṇa’s opinion, because it does not depend on anything else. The school came to hold that the Veda has no author at all, and that cognition is valid of itself, a doctrine it shares with Vedānta and calls svataḥ-prāmāṇya. In Mādhava’s fourteenth-century chapter on Jaimini, a Nyāya objector argues that God is the author; the reply is that the Veda has “a self-established authority in all matters relating to duty”. I read this dispute as a philosopher of testimony, not as a specialist. Whether words can carry knowledge when no one stands behind them is the shape of the question I ask about language models; see my notes on Indian philosophy.

How does the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra work?

Mostly as a method, in twelve chapters. Mādhava’s summary shows the range: the authority of injunction, explanatory passage, mantra, tradition and name; how a rite’s parts relate as principal and subordinate; the order of performance; who may sacrifice; how the details of one rite carry over to another.

The unseen effect is apūrva. A rite is performed today and its fruit comes later, so something must connect them. In Mādhava’s account the new-moon and full-moon sacrifices produce an unseen effect through the subordinate acts of the whole ceremony. Mīmāṃsā’s analysis of language has also been of central importance, Wikipedia notes, to the legal literature of India.

What was Jaimini’s influence?

Mīmāṃsā shaped the other schools. Prabhākara’s branch counted five means of knowledge and Kumārila’s six, adding non-perception, and śabda, testimony, is among them. Vedānta, “the end of the Veda”, studies the Upaniṣads, the later part. Rāmānuja, citing an older commentator, held that the enquiry into works and the enquiry into Brahman make one body of doctrine, sixteen chapters in all.

How should you start reading Jaimini?

There is no text by Jaimini in the library. The nearest is Rāmānuja’s commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, which opens by tying them to Mīmāṃsā (read it here). Then read the first chapter of Sandal’s 1923 translation, or Chapter XII of the Cowell and Gough Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha, a medieval summary of the school. For the wider setting, see Indian philosophy.