Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 70

IV
GOD, THE SOUL, AND MATTER
THOUGH the Mimāmsā is so deeply concerned with the sacrifice, it has no belief in the doctrine that the rewards of offering are to be expected either from the deities to whom the offerings are directed to be made, or from a God as creator or apportioner of reward and punishment. The sacrifice generates an unseen potency, whence the goods desired by sacrificers are obtained ; the Vedānta Sutra (III, 2, 40) expressly negatives the idea that in Jaimini's view there was divine intervention in this regard, and the atheism of the true Mīmāmsā is regarded with such unanimity as to render it impossible to explain it away." The full development, however, of the doctrine is, as usual, to be found in Prabhākara and Kumārila, who adopted from the Nyaya-Vaisesika the groundwork of their views of the world, but declined to follow that school in its speculations on the existence of a creator.?
The Nyaya-Vaiseşika, accepting the doctrine of atoms on the one hand and of the periodical creation and destruction of the world on the other, had found it necessary to introduce the conception of a creator, in order to secure in some measure a mode of bringing about the renewal and destruction of the combinations of the atoms and their connection with souls. But Prabhākara and Kumārıla alıke deny absolutely the validity of the belief in the periodic creation and dissolution of all things; they accept a con
1 As des Max Müller, $1x Systents, pp. 275.79; cf. K. L. Sarkar, Tagore Law Lectures, 1905, p. 508.
** Prakaranapanciká, pp. 137-40 ; Slokavarttika, pp. 639-80 ; Manameyodaya, pp. 70-74; cf. Nyayamañjari, pp. 193-204 ; Şad darsanasamuccaya, pp. 284 ff.