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102
THE KARMA-MIMAMSĀ
his all, his children are excluded from the gift. The same passage is also employed to express the limited character of the ownership of a king or a feudatory; his actual ownership is restricted to whatever property he has acquired; his position towards the territory is one of sovereignty or suzeranity, entitling him to a maintenance but not to true ownership; when a king is said to give a village, he does not transfer the ownership of the land, which is not his to give, but assigns to the donee the right of drawing a maintenance from the village.
The Mlimāṁsā also affords guidance to Vijñānesvara (II, 136) in a variety of details in connection with heritage and partition. The claim of woman to inherit is questioned on the ground that, as property is intended for sacrificial purposes and as save along with her husband a woman has no locus standi as a sacrificer, on the interpretation of the Mimārsā Sutra (VI, 1, 17-21) adopted in the commentators, there is no ground for her having the right of inlieritance. This illiberal doctrine is disposed of by appeal 10 another passage of the Mimārsā Sutra (III, 4, 26) 10 which it refers to ornaments of gold worn by the priests and the sacrificer, though serving no sacrificial purpose. The exact share of a wife raises difficulties in view of the conflicting interpretation of the two main texts, the first of which provides that, if an owner divides property in his lifetime, he should make his wives have equal shares with his sons, and the second, that on partition after the death of the husband the wife should have a share equal to that of her sons. These passages are interpreted by some authorities to mean that, if the property is extensive, she is to have a mere subsistence from the estate, while, if it is small, she is to have an equal share. This view is rejected on the strength of the principle upheld by Jaimini (VII, 3, 19-25) that, so long as a text can yield a single coherent meaning, it is not right to treat it as broken into two incongruous parts. SimiLarly it is on the Mīmāmsã rule (V, 1. 4-7) of following the order of things mentioned in a certain order that is based the claim that, when the parents of a childless son succeed to his property, the mother has a prior claim, because the term parents (pitarau) is explained in grammatical treatises
