ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an introduction to the three strands of enquiry that make up the conceptual framework guiding the development and explication of the central argument. It begins with a brief introduction on Jaimini and his text – the Mīmāṃsāsūtras. Its location of the text between the codification-driven Śrauta-sūtras and the speculation-driven Darśana-sūtras, coupled with the claim that Jaimini’s conception of dharma can be read as a philosophy of Vedic practice, serves to supplement the claim that Jaimini’s vision and approach are already implicitly hermeneutic in its orientation. The chapter then provides a historical background of the Western hermeneutical tradition and explicates the constitutive features of a hermeneutic tradition of enquiry, which includes: (a) the notion of a shared telos, (b) the authority of an internal rationality, and (c) the institution of an answerable practising community. Each of these themes forms the conceptual lens through which the Mīmāṃsāsūtras is re-read. It then presented a historical background to the scholarship on ritual, particularly in light of the myth-ritual and thought-action dichotomy, to argue that this classical dichotomy gave rise to an understanding of ritual as an empty and thoughtless action. This claim is then divided into three contemporary contentions about (a) the representation of ritual as a meaningful practice, (b) the challenges of a universal rationality and (c) the articulation of ritual through the agency of the ritual actant, each of which is governed by a reductionist form of enquiry. The chapter ends with a brief overview of how the notion of ritual, subjectivity, and tradition may be conceptually related to one another.
