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VEDANTA-SUTRAS.
intelligible without a commentary. The most essential words are habitually dispensed with; nothing is, for instance, more common than the simple omission of the subject or predicate of a sentence. And when here and there a Sûtra occurs whose words construe without anything having to be supplied, the phraseology is so eminently vague and obscure that without the help derived from a commentary we should be unable to make out to what subject the Sûtra refers. When undertaking to translate either of the Mîmâmsâsûtras we therefore depend altogether on commentaries; and hence the question arises which of the numerous commentaries extant is to be accepted as a guide to their right understanding.
The commentary here selected for translation, together with Bâdarayana's Sûtras1 (to which we shall henceforth. confine our attention to the exclusion of Gaimini's Purva Mîmâmsâ-sûtras), is the one composed by the celebrated theologian Sankara or, as he is commonly called, Sankarâkârya. There are obvious reasons for this selection. In the first place, the Sankara-bhâshya represents the socalled orthodox side of Brahmanical theology which strictly upholds the Brahman or highest Self of the Upanishads as something different from, and in fact immensely superior to, the divine beings such as Vishnu or Siva, which, for many centuries, have been the chief objects of popular worship in India. In the second place, the doctrine advocated by Sankara is, from a purely philosophical point of view and apart from all theological considerations, the most important and interesting one which has arisen on Indian soil; neither those forms of the Vedânta which diverge from the view represented by Sankara nor any of the non-Vedantic systems can be compared with the so-called orthodox Vedanta in boldness, depth, and subtlety of speculation. In the third place, Sankara's bhâshya is, as far as we know, the oldest of the extant commentaries, and relative antiquity is at any rate one of the circumstances which have to be
1 The Sutras in which the glânakânda of the Veda is systematised go by various names, being called either Vedanta-sûtras, or Uttara Mîmâmsâ-sûtras, or Brahma-sûtras, or Sârîraka Mîmâmsâ-sûtras.
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