[Advaita-l] Purva Mimamsa from the Vedantic perspective

S Jayanarayanan sjayana at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 18 16:47:14 CST 2004


--- "Jaldhar H. Vyas" <jaldhar at braincells.com> wrote:

[..]

> In 3.2.38-42 the question is what is the cause of the fruit of
> actions?
> Jaimini thinks the ritual act itself produces the result and
> therefore
> there is no need to to postulate some entity to provide that result.
> Thus we see that despite there zealous orthodoxy in Vedic ritual, the
> Mimamsakas are actually atheistic!  Badarayana objects and
> establishes the
> siddhanta that Ishvara is the phala data.
> 

The word "atheism", AFAIK, does not have an exact counterpart in
Sanskrit. According to Ganganath Jha's translation of the
shlokavArttika, KumArila says in his tenth invocatory verse that he
wants to turn mImAmsA towards theism, but never affirms the Ishvara,
and in fact argues that there cannot exist an omniscient being! I don't
have KumArila's original Sanskrit works with me, but I believe it is
quite wrong to translate the word "astika" as a theist. In his section
on "AtmavAda", KumArila affirms the existence of the *self* and ends it
with "hence concludes the refutation of atheism". Evidently, according
to KumArila, *denying the self* is equivalent to atheism, not denying
the existence of an Ishvara who awards the fruits of Karma.

-Kartik

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