Thinking Ritually: Rediscovering the Purva Mimamsa of Jaimini.

• Author: Smith, Frederick M.

Francis X. Clooney has written an important and insightful monograph on the Indian exegetical "philosophy" called Purva Mimamsa. In it he argues persuasively that the Purva Mimamsa Sutra of Jaimini (ca. 200 B.C.E.) has not been explained, or probably understood, in its original spirit by either native Sanskrit commentators (except largely by Prabhakara) or modern scholars. He demonstrates the ways in which the tradition of Mimamsa, beginning with Sabara, updated Jaimini ("misrepresented" is probably too harsh an assessment), and how the modern scholarly tradition, with little inclination to delve deeply into the jungle of ritual details which largely constitute the sutra text, has taken the first adhyaya and the first pada of the second adhyaya as representing the sum of Jaimini's achievement. Thus, as Clooney forcefully shows, in most methodologies the text as a whole remains unexploited. As an example, he notes that the debate on sabdapramana "has been prematurely and disproportionately thorough, since the arguments have not been put in the perspective of the rest of the text." With regard to previous scholarship, he says, "Lack of clarity about the purpose of the Sutras and a failure to discriminate among the systems of Jaimini, Sabara, and Kumarila, have resulted in very limited success in determining the context of various Mimamsa discussions." He thus advocates, and makes as his project, "a return to the Sutras themselves as distinguishable from the Bhasya." While recognizing the indispensability of Sabara's bhasya, Clooney also feels that it is not infallible. "My intention is to 'fix the sense of the Mimamsa Sutras as a whole' by an intensive and internal study of the text itself, working from a knowledge of parts of the text to a sense of the whole." One extremely noteworthy inclusion in this chapter is an explanation of Jaimini's use of the particles va, na, tu, iti cet, etc.

After stating his goals in the first chapter, Clooney discusses in chapter II the style and purpose of Jaimini's sutra text, which structurally and temporally he places midway between the srauta sutras that preceded it and the philosophical sutras that followed it. "Jaimini's text is more speculative than the srauta sutras, because it contains reflection on the nature of the Veda, the performer, the Vedic schools, etc.; but this speculation still presumes that the sacrifice is the primary 'intelligible'. However sophisticated Mimamsa reasoning becomes, it...