Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 15

6
THE KARMA-MĪMĀMSA
and, unless this is established, the argument for contemporaneity is invalid. It is true that it is impossible to deduce from the style of the Mimamsă as Pūrva-Mimämsä a relation of temporal priority for Jaimini's work; the Mimāmsā is prior to the Vedanta because it deals with the sacred rites, the knowledge of which, in the view of one school of Vedanta, is an indispensable preliminary to the krowledge of the absolute, though Samkara declines to accept this view and insists instead on the diverse character of the ends of the two disciplines, which renders it impossible to treat the former as the normal or necessary prelude to the latter.1 Nonetheless it remains true that we must assume that the Mīmāmsā as a science developed before the Vedanta * The former was plainly necessitated by the development of the sacrificial ritual with which it is immediately connected, and it serves an important practical end; the latter is proof of the growth of a philosophical spirit, which sought to comprehend as a whole the extremely varied speculations which are scattered in the Aranyakas and Upanisads While, of course, it is not impossible that the redaction of the two Sutras was contemporaneous, despite the earlier development of the Mimamsa, the probability surely lies in favour of the view that the Mimāmsa Sutra was redacted. first and served as a model for the other schools.
Even if this view is accepted, it remains difficult to assign any definite date to the Sutra. It contains no certain reference to Buddhist tenets of any kind, for the term buddha, in I, 2, 33, has not this signification, and we need not with Kumarila read a reference to Buddhism into I, 3, 5, and 6. The Vedanta Sutra is of uncertain date; if we believe Samkara, it criticises (II, 2, 28-32) the Vijñānaväda school of Buddhism, but this doctrine is probably wrong and we need see only a reference to the Sunyavāda of Nagarjuna. The date of this school is uncertain; if we accept the opinion that it was not enunciated before Nagarjuna in such a manner as to invite criticism in the
1 Deussen, Vedanta, ch. I.
Thibaut, S.B.E., XXXIV, ix ff.
Jacobi, J.4.0.S., XXXI, 1 ff: Keith, J.R.A.9., 1914, pp. 1091 ff; see below, pp. 46, 47.