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Why The Veda Has No Author Language As Ritual in Early Mīmāṃsā and Post-ModernTheology by Francis X. Clooney
Why The Veda Has No Author Language As Ritual in Early Mīmāṃsā and Post-ModernTheology by Francis X. Clooney
Why the Veda Has No Author: Language as Ritual in Early Mīmāṃsā and Post-Modern
Theology
Author(s): Francis X. Clooney
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 659-
684
Published by: Oxford University Press
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from the start;its ultimate concern had to do with the why of sacrifice
and with the intelligibility and predictability of a religious path
founded on the performance of particular actions according to certain
texts. Certainly, it was on the basis of its more general rules and meta-
rules that Mimaimsainfluenced much of later Indian thinking.
The question of intelligibility demanded attention because
Jaimini's took shape in a world in which the traditionalintel-
ligibility undergirding Vedic orthodoxy had lost its power to convince.
Mimim.sa
It was no longer self-evident, for instance, that sacrificeswould please
deities and lead to rewards, that offering sacrificeswould hold the uni-
verse together, or that the Veda itself was a reliable source of informa-
tion. The Buddhists and Jainas, as well as world-renunciants still
within the Vedic fold, de-mythologized the idea of sacrifice and con-
tended that these actions were not qualitatively different from, and
would lead to results no more permanent than, other actions. Skeptics
of all sorts charged that the sacrificesdid not produce what they prom-
ised to produce, while those whom today we might label "Vedic funda-
mentalists" simply put aside questions of meaning and asserted that
sacrificeshad to be performed, no matter what one might think about
them. Called into question, it seems, was the notion that there could
be any perspective from which the whole of the ritual world could be
comprehended and hence kept intact. The pieces were all there--
brahmin priests, fires, rice to be cooked, words to be chanted, gods to
be invoked, etc.-but they no longer cohered convincingly.
Mimairmsa's response to the whole range of criticisms was to
rethink its world without reliance on any single viewpoint, effectively
undercutting the possibility of a single perspective. It sought a justifi-
cation for sacrifice that needed no external validation, either from
active gods or satisfiedhumans, and that required the positing neither
of any supernaturalrealities nor a reliable world order beyond that of
good Sanskrit texts, well-performed sacrifices, and a set of rules for
integrating the two.
Jaimini and his commentator Sabara primarily wel :ncerned
with achieving a right understanding of the rules of sacrificialaction
and sacrificialtext so as to ensure that what one saw and heard at a
sacrifice would cohere--be intelligible-regardless of what anyone
might say about it from some particular perspective. In discovering
these rules they sought to replace the "laws of the cosmos" with the
"laws of language and ritual," and reliance on gods and humans (as
norms for meaning) with an appreciation for the harmony of text and
action (and everything accompanying them, even in orthodox society
as a whole) that underlay the well-wrought sacrifice.
Such rules were desirable, since rules are by nature humanly intel-
ligible (so that they can be obeyed) and not dependent on the humans
who observe them (so that they must be obeyed). When the rules are
known and obeyed, they depend on no particular opinion, any more
than do the rules of grammar. Because they govern the totality of
experience, they overcome fragmentation by making the location and
relation of any particular fragment-be it a god, a human, a word-
more important than the stability of the thing itself. In the course of
articulating these rules, the Mimamsakasmade the three claims cited
above, to which we will now turn, attending as well to their modern
analogues.
4 For a fuller examinationof the meaning of artha in the Sutras,see my 1984 University
of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation, "Retrieving the Pfirva Mima.msuof Jaimini", due to
appear as Volume 17 in the series, Publicationsof the De Nobili ResearchLibrary, Indo-
logical Institute, University of Vienna--especially Chapter IV, and the briefer 1986
exposition.
5 In commenting on 12.4.37 Sabaraasserts that in cases of conflict the "inherent cohe-
sion" of the ritual takes precedence over "meaningfulness."
tion of human desires and needs, including the demand for intelligibil-
ity. The sacrifice does serve its performer's interests, even if it does
not have that as its sole or primary purpose. Penner (13) is correct in
his criticism of Staal's strained effort to interpret as meaningless what
is evidently meaningful to the ritualistswho performed and described
the elaborate rites. Semiotics aside, one can simply point to the
Mima-msaelaboration of the complex structure of meanings within and
around the sacrifice to see that we have-at least as far as the Indian
ritual theorists themselves are concerned-not a lack of meaning but a
lack of an exclusive determination of meaning by self-interested
performers.
ing the ritual. The priest told to recite a yajur (identified merely by its
starting words) may not be sure where the yajur ends or when he is to
stop reciting, since there is no necessary linguistic stopping point in a
prose passage.
This would not be the case with the other two kinds of texts, "rgs,"
which are poetic verses divided into metrical feet, and "sdmans,"
which are verses set to music and sung, most often some of the same
rgs. Hearing either of these, one would come to natural stopping
points without having to refer to meaning.
Jaimini'sdefinition of "statement" solves the problem by identify-
ing prose unit as a group of words with a complete meaning (artha),
a
which "lacks nothing." But this "meaning" is a ritual referent, some
aspect of the ritual referred to by the words in the prose passage, and
not a coherent syntactical meaning separable from the ritual context.
This ritually grounded "statement" can be comprised of two or more
grammatical sentences, however many are required to denote prop-
erly the ritual referent at hand. For example, in discussing the defini-
tion of "statement," (PMS 2.1.40) the commentator Sabaraintroduces
the following text from the Taittiriya (1.1.4.2), one of the
Vedic collections of texts related to the Sam.hita
sacrifices:
On the impulse of the god Savitr,with the arms of the
Agvins,withthe handsof Pisan, I offerthee dearto Agni,to Agni
and Soma.8
Correct reading of the passage allows for repetition of the verb, "I
offer," with each phrase-"I offer on the impulse ... I offer with the
arms ... etc."-and there would then be no strictly grammatical rea-
son that each should not be a separate sentence. But in the appropri-
ate context of the Dariapfirnamisa sacrifice, it is clear that only one
offering is at issue, modified by the mentioned deities-Savitr, Aivins,
etc. This ritual location, not an independent reading of the words
themselves as a grammatical unit, determines the limits of the unit of
meaning. One cannot read properly without knowing the ritual
context.
The second term in this first pair is prakarana, often translated as
"context" or "leading subject matter." It too has a more than verbal
reference and is carefully distinguished by the Mimramsakasfrom
"place" (sthdna), which more closely refers to words or ideas placed
contiguously "on a page" or, better, placed together in the units to be
memorized in a particular school of Vedic practice.9 The notion of
prakarana comes into use for the following reason. Sacrificesare often
8 As translatedby A.B. Keith.
9 Sthdna too has a ritual meaning, referring to the location of things in the sacrificial
arena.
3. The Veda has no author, no meaning beyond the words and the
sacrificial actions themselves; one cannot appeal to a pre-
verbal intention to get beyond the words.
If we connect the ritual implication of language with the earlier
claim that in a sacrificethe sacrificeris only an instrument, and neither
the creator of the rites nor their finality, it should not come as a sur-
prise that like the sacrifices themselves, the Veda has no creator, no
author. People do not invent their rituals, nor author their sacred
texts, says Mimfamsa.
This authorlessnessis based on a homologization of the speaker or
text-performer to the sacrificial-performer.Because the Veda is insep-
13It is interesting to note in addition that the division of the Veda into three Vedas is a
ritual one, grouping texts to be used by the three active priests at major rites: texts for
the chanter (hotr)are in the Rg Veda, for the singer (udgatr)in the Sdma Veda, and for
the priest performing the actions (adhvaryu)in the YajurVeda.
14But without using this term until a subsequent discussionof the
meaningfulness of
mantras, in 1.2.43.
arable from the ritual, the "performer"of the Veda, the expounder or
reciter of its words, is likewise inseparable from it. His function with
regard to the text is subject to the same strictures governing the per-
former of sacrificial actions: he speaks it because it makes sense to
him, either in its content (and Mimurmsakas insist that the content of
the Vedic texts should be understood) or because he hopes to attain
some goal, such as the reward accruing to the sacrifice,but he does not
determine the meaning. His participation is necessary, but he makes
no creative contribution; he utters them, he can understand them as
he wishes, but he cannot change them or "own" them. He "activates"
the text by making it audible, but has no role in its composition, which
is already set and inter-structuredwith the ritual. He is ever preceded
by the word.15
The position is presented without fanfare and briefly in the Stitras.
When, near the beginning of the Sttras, an opponent proposes the
argument that the Vedic scriptures cannot be a source of certain
knowledge because their authors may be fallible, Jaimini simply states
that the sacred text is prior to and, in regard to its composition,
independent of those who have taught it; i.e., it has speakers but no
authors: "It has been explained that word is prior (to its speakers)."
(1.1.29-30) Only later was the assertion formalized as the doctrine of
the "authorlessness"(apauruseyatva)of the text.16
The reduction of the author to speaker/expounder makes it
15As suggested above, this notion of subordinateagency, in speech as well as ritual, is
supported by the fundamental structures of the Sanskritlanguage, and later Mimam-
sakasnote this point. Thus Prabha.kara,an important eight-century Mim&imsaka, offers
citationsfrom Panini'sgrammarin defense of Jaimini'stheory. But Jaiminirelies simply
on an understanding of how ritual uses its performers to indicate the limited role of
apparent authors.
16The idea of authorlessnessin ancient India can be analyzed from a variety of per-
spectives. For instance, one could look at the grammar of classical Sanskrititself, in
which most Indiantheological and philosophicaltexts were composed. Sanskritdoes not
understandthe structureof a sentence to be that of subject/predicate,but rather that of
a verb qualifiedby various relationships,including to agent and instrument, place, etc.
The "subject"of the sentence is, grammaticallyspeaking,only apparent. Edwin Gerow
has explored at length the relationship between certain grammaticalstructures in the
Sanskritlanguage and philosophicalstructuresin Vedanta philosophyin particular. His
observationson the impersonalstructure of Sanskritare pertinent for a comprehensive
understandingof the notion of "authorlessness."
Or, one might begin by attending to the general orthodox Brahmanicalnotion that
the originalseers (rsis)saw the Veda at the beginning of the age but did not compose it.
I have chosen to place the notion of authorlessnessagainst the specifically Mimamsa
background because it is in this school that the important connection of language to
ritual is most clearly explored, and the "theological"implicationsof authorlessnessmost
developed; also, because it is in response to this school'sformulationof the matter that
some of the most interesting theological responses are formed. I do not intend, how-
ever, to suggest that the Mim~msaviewpoint developed in isolation from grammatical
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