ABSTRACT
It is generally overlooked that despite the intense ritualistic foreground of the traditional Mimamsakas, with Kumarila Bhana a shift occurs from the ritualistic to the speculative, epistemological and grammatical, and this is achieved with some degree of dialectical acumen. l Parthasarathi Misra's discussion of issues in language arises in this context and it underscores an intellectual defence of the Mlmathsa position on the authorless character and inviolable authority of Sruti. Here is the staunchest possible articulation on astikatva which in principle makes no commitment to the existence of a transcendental (supreme) being, or to any transcendental signified (which is not erasable). Rather curiously, a good part of the erstwhile defence is based on the postulate of the inseparability of word and its meaning, known generally as the autpattika thesis. Elsewhere I have discussed autpattika in the context of the apauru~eyatva doctrine. 2 Here I shall be concerned mostly with elucidating the Mimathsa view on sentence-meaning in the work of Parthasarathi Misra who follows the Bhana school even as he brings some new insights to bear on the analysis. Since the autpattikatva of the word and its meaning is a necessary presupposition of the theory of vakytirtha, I shall
be touching on this thesis as well. The discussion overall is apposite in the ambience of this volume as Professor Frits Staal has made several significant observations and even criticisms of the MimliIhsa view of language, especially in respect of the belief that language per se need not be dependent upon human origins or conventions and the Vedas or Sruti being the limiting case of just such a possibility. 3
What however would be the convincing conditions for the scriptural texts if they are not thought to be dependent on any framework of conventions (sarhketa)?
