MIMAMSA : THE HISTORY

Mimamsa originated not as a school but as a successor to the ritual Sutra literature, whose purpose was to correctly interpret the Vedas. The focus was on ritual traditions found in the Vedas and also the Brahmanas. In using these texts for the sacrifices priests had met with numerous difficulties. The texts contain an imperfect and obscure description of the rituals and are interspersed continually with speculations on the mystical meaning of the separate ritual acts and the implements used. It was the function of the Mimamsa school to solve these problems by providing principles from their investigation which would give guidance in the interpretation of Vedic texts for performing the sacrificial rituals.The earliest Mimamsa text is also the most important, the Mimamsa Sutra of Jaimini, composed between 300 and 100 BCE. The first surviving commentary on Jaimini is by Sabara in the fifth or sixth century CE, who developed Jaimini's arguments and also defined dharma more exactly.The Vedic orientation of Mimamsa meant that as bhakti, devotional worship, developed it was rejected.The Mimamsa school divided into the subschools of the Prabhakaras and the Bhattas. The Prabhakaras followed their most important exponent, Prabhakara, who lived around the fifth to sixth centuries CE, while the Bhattas followed their main exponent, Kumarila Bhatta, who lived in the eighth century CE. Kumarila was influenced by the study of Buddhist logic developed by Dignaga (c. 480-540) and Dharmakirti (c. 600-670).Mimamsa was to provide the basis for Tantric linguistic or metalinguistic speculations.Only Mimamsa and Vedanta of the six Hindu philosophical schools have ongoing continuity into the present.