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106
THE KARMA-MĪMĀMSA
other occasions reduces a plural to its bare meaning of three.
Even more interesting is a case in which the law of evidence is influenced by the Mimārusă doctrine of the self validity of cognitions. Yājñavalkya lays down (II, 80) that, if a inan has brought forward witnesses, yet if at a later period he can produce more satisfactory testimony, the evidence already adduced is to be discredited. This procedure, at first sight drastic, is justified by the adduction in the Mitākşarī of the arguments adduced by the Vettikära in support of the self-evidence of cognitions. Evidence is prima facie valid, unless it can be shown that the witness could not have known the facts, that his means of knowledge were defective (kāranadosa), or his evidence is displaced by other evidence, that is, the first cognition is sublated by a second cognition. Immediately after, Vijñānes vara (II, 83) has recourse to the Mimämsā to provide a suitable penance for the witness whom he enjoins to withhold evidence or testimony, where the proof of the charge would result in the infliction of the capital penalty ; in these cases the usual punishment of a fine, or in the case of a Brahman banishment, is not in point ; still, to do away with the sin of the deviation from the truth the performance of a special offering, the Sarasvateşti, given in the Mimārsá, is prescribed.
As is patural, the obligations of the law books to the Mimämsā principles are still more marked in those parts of those treatises which deal, not with civil law (vyavahāra) in the narrower sense of the term, but with religious custom and penances. Even in the civil law, however, there is one point on which the law books differ in essentials from Jaimini; it was necessary for the latter, in support of his doctrine of the eternity of the Veda, to maintain that its commands are universal, and thus he treats even Smrtí texts which contain injunctions expressed as local practises as really laying down general principles. In the practical Deeds of the law, however, the utmost value is always attached to local customs, and the practice of good men, which thus in effect comes to outweigh maxims in Smộtis, if in any place these are not followed. Yet
