1. Introduction

In view of propriety, it follows that those past mothers who were causes of his happiness would appear in front of him at his mere will. For, it is not right that a yogin of a pure mind should have a desire for or association with those mothers who were the causes of his misery and a means of his being born as a domestic swine.^[1]

One should not think that the results of ritual and meditation are permanent, like relation is amongst the Dravidians.^[2]

“The face of truth is covered with a golden dish.
Open it, O Pūṣan, for me, a man faithful to the truth.
Open it, O Pūṣan, for me to see.”

—The man who performs a combination of “knowledge” and “action” is praying to the sun at the time of his death.^[3]

In conceptualizing the Veda as a canon, Śaṅkara’s entry point was that scripture had to satisfy some need of man, it had to be useful and have practical value. “The purpose of śruti is to instruct about human needs.”^[4] As should be obvious by now, Śaṅkara inherited this conviction from Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, and he also fully shared the worst nightmare of Vedic theology, that upholding certain doctrines may render parts of the Veda purposeless: The Veda in its entirety must be useful in satisfying some human need.

Śaṅkara also shared the broadest significance of the Mīmāṃsā understanding that there are goals of different kinds that men strive after, and that there are means suitable for the achieving of such goals, both felicitously going under the appellation of puruṣārtha: there are, in other words, human needs that are puruṣārtha, such as getting comfort and avoiding discomfort, and then there are things and actions, such as houses and house construction, that satisfy these needs, which are also puruṣārtha.^[5] He participated fully, thus, in the technical jargon of Vedic theology, where puruṣārtha could be either a determinative or a possessive compound, and where there were goals and results (sādhya, phala) and means (sādhana) of the principal and subordinate kind (pradhāna, guṇa), all teleologically organized in a unique whole. The goals that men aspire for could be classified in two broad groups: enjoyment, which can be generally defined as obtaining comfort and avoiding discomfort, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth.^[6]

Pursuing enjoyment is, of course, not restricted to men, and the specific characteristic that constituted the human condition was that men were entitled to pursuing goals by Vedic means, that is, by dharma. This specifically human pursuit was supposed to be directed to the two goals that we introduced in the previous part, abhyudaya or promotion and niḥśreyasa or the highest good. “For, only men are specifically entitled to promotion and liberation.”^[7] As we saw in the previous part, these two were by Śaṅkara’s time a common currency in Vedic theology, standardized in the Manu-Smṛti around the category of kāma and used even by Kumārila. Nevertheless, Śaṅkara would be the first to think about the two thoroughly and to organize the Veda in the most minute detail around them.

Śaṅkara’s understanding of dharma was also shared with Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā: dharma is the specifically Vedic means of achieving a human good of the two afore-mentioned kinds.^[8] By “specifically Vedic,” we mean that knowledge of dharma was available only in the Veda and not through any other reliable warrant. These were all, in fact, shared presuppositions of the whole field of Vedic theology. Prābhākaras, of course, though that the essential characteristic of dharma was obligation and not instrumentality, but they did not deny that dharma was a means of achieving good: Śālikanātha proposed that this feature of dharma as being a means to a desirable result was how one could recognize dharma among many other actions that were in themselves causes of suffering.^[9] An upalakṣaṇa of a sort.

When we consider, however, how Śaṅkara understood the workings of dharma and the Veda in securing human good, a gulf of difference appears before us and we witness a comprehensive rethinking of the nature of the two. This rethinking, moreover, was eventually responsible for the specifically Advaita understanding of liberation and for the formulation of the mahā-vākya idea.

We saw in the Second Chapter that Mīmāṃsakas considered that the specific sphere in which the Veda is epistemically valid was that of things that are not empirically available. Śabara famously said: “For, (only) an injunction and not any sense organ is able to make known a thing that is past, present or future and is subtle, hidden, remote or suchlike in kind.”^[10] This was a quite broad definition, but its implications for Mīmāṃsakas were not at all straightforward. The primary and independent validity of the Veda was restricted to ritual action, or, to be specific, to an otherwise unknown causal relationship between ritual action of a certain kind—offering, pouring, giving—and a future state of affairs desirable to men. This specific causal relationship was fully unknown from other sources. The teleology of the sacrifice and its expression in the Veda was, of course, predicated on the use of common things—clarified butter, rice, wooden posts, sacrificial animals, fire—but these things were empirically available, otherwise known, and the Veda was not a reliable warrant on their nature or characteristics. Its validity concerning them was exhausted in what Mīmāṃsakas called itikartavyatā, details of sacrificial procedure, namely how these common things should be employed in sacrifice so that the ritual performance would bring the desired result. So, although Śabara said that matters of fact past and present are in the domain of the validity of the Veda, this was a very restricted and dependent validity.

We also saw that related to the question of the validity of the Veda was the issue of language. Mīmāṃsakas claimed that only the Vedic sentences of the injunctive kind had independent validity. We may illustrate this with Śabara’s interpretation of the case that is now well-known to us, in which a substance assumes the role of the primary element in a ritual performance because its use brings a specific result: yoghurt for heaven, khādira wood for virility. Śabara claimed that even in such cases, the character of the Vedic sentence was not existential or informative: “The injunctive ending establishes the relation between khādira wood and virility; it does not state anything existing in the present.”^[11] Even in such cases, then, there had to be an injunction that would establish the causal relationship, and a sentence without such an injunction was, strictly speaking, defective. An often-quoted proverbial verse says: “In all the Vedas, the following five words are sure signs of an injunction: kuryāt (should make), kriyeta (should be made), kartavyam (ought to be made), bhavet (should become), syāt (should be).”^[12]

This was all quite uncontroversial across the whole field of Mīmāṃsā: The Veda commands and intimates some unknown causal relationship. However, the fault line in Mīmāṃsā appeared over the question of what has the epistemic priority in Vedic commands: is it the command itself comprehended first, or is it the causal relationship? Thus, Prābhākaras on the one hand argued that the Veda first commands and then informs. Maṇḍana Miśra expressed this both eloquently and succinctly: “While conveying an obligation, the injunction intimates matters of fact as well.”^[13] The process of knowing from Vedic linguistic utterances was understanding an obligation as a unitary idea from the whole sentence or larger piece of text first; only then and through the command could one proceed to knowing the meaning of smaller linguistic units and any matter-of-fact information. Kumārila, on the other hand, started from knowing the meaning of words and smaller linguistic units first, where the awareness that one had to do something would appear only after one had understood some amount of individual information and comprehended the causal relationship between the ritual performance and the future state of affairs. In some cases, one also had to be convinced that the proposed ritual was good and beneficial solely through understanding non-injunctive texts, the arthavāda passages from the Brāhmaṇas. Kumārila’s insistence that a thinking man does not do anything without understanding that an action is beneficial opened in a sense a can of worms in Vedic theology. It became possible to ask: “Well, what if I do not see this as beneficial?” It also provided the starting point for Śaṅkara’s rethinking of pramāṇa, dharma and the Veda.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

mātaro janayitryo 'tītāḥ sukha-hetu-bhūtāḥ sāmarthyāt. na hi duḥkha-hetu-bhūtāsu grāma-sūkarādi-janma-nimittāsu mātṛṣu viśuddha-sattvasya yogina icchā tat-saṃbandho vā yuktaḥ. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.2.2-9, VII.483.

[2]:

bhāvanājaṃ phalaṃ yat syād yac ca syāt karmaṇaḥ phalam | na tat thāsnv iti mantavyaṃ draviḍeṣv iva saṅgatam. Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi 3.93.

[3]:

hiraṇmayena pātreṇa satyasyāpihitaṃ mukham |
tat tvam pūṣann apāvṛṇu satya-dharmāya dṛṣṭaye || —Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.15.1. Translation Olivelle 1998:141.
yo jñāna-karma-samuccaya-kārī so 'nta-kāla ādityaṃ prārthayati.—Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.15.1, X.737.

[4]:

puruṣārthopadeśa-paratvāc chrutīnām; Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.4, VI.50.

[5]:

See Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 2.2.1 and 2.2.6.

[6]:

This twofold classification is reconstructed from his rebuttal of Sāṅkhya in the first pāda of the second adhyāya of the Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra, but is so commonplace in his intellectual milieu that it can be safely said that he endorses it.

[7]:

manuṣya-grahaṇaṃ viśeṣato 'dhikāra-jñāpanārtham. manuṣyā eva hi viśeṣato 'bhyudaya-niḥśreyasa-sādhane 'dhikṛtā ity abhiprāyaḥ. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.9, VIII.120.

[8]:

prāṇināṃ sākṣād abhyudaya-niḥśreyasa-hetur yaḥ sa dharmaḥ. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bhagavad-Gītā Introduction, XI.2. This understanding of dharma was extended at the hand of Maṇḍana Miśra and became the norm in Bhāṭṭa-Mīmāṃsā and Advaita Vedānta to refer to all human action, not only that regulated in the Veda, as iṣṭa-sādhanatā, a means to something desirable. On this, see David 2013 for a most lucid account.

[9]:

svabhāvena hi karmāṇi dukhotpāda-hetu-bhūtāni. teṣu kāryatvāvagamaḥ phala-sādhanatāvagama-nibandhanaḥ. Śālikanātha’s Vākyārtha-Mātṛkā 2.9, p.37.

[10]:

codanā hi bhūtaṃ bhavantaṃ bhaviṣyantaṃ sūkṣmaṃ vyavahitaṃ viprakṛṣṭam ity evaṃjātīyakam arthaṃ śaknoty avagamayitum, nānyat kiṃcanendriyam. Śabara’s Bhāṣya on the Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra 1.1.2, I.13

[11]:

vidhi-vibhaktiḥ kuryād iti vīrya-khādira-sambandhasya vidhātrī, na ca vartamānāpadeśinī. Śabara’s Bhāṣya on the Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra 4.3.3, IV.1247.

[12]:

kuryāt kriyeta kartavyaṃ bhavet syād iti pañcamam |
etat syāt sarva-vedeṣu niyataṃ vidhi-lakṣaṇam ||—In Śabara’s Bhāṣya on the Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra, ibid; Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.3.1, VIII.40. See Devasthali 1959:177.

[13]:

kāryam artham avagamayantī codanaiva bhūtādikam apy artham avagamayati. Maṇḍana Miśra’s Brahma-Siddhi p.74.