Indian philosophy, the orthodox schools · c. 3rd c. BCE to 2nd c. CE
Mimamsa
Overview
The school that interprets the Veda’s ritual commands. Dharma is known from those commands, read carefully, and a rite is done because the text requires it.
Mimamsa reads the earlier part of the Veda as injunction. Jaimini’s question is what the rite requires, not what a later commentator prefers the hymn to mean. Dharma, here, is known from those instructions. If the text says a certain act is to be done, the school’s work is to say precisely which act, by whom, with what.
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The result of a rite is not always something you can point at when the fire goes out. From Shabara’s commentary onward, the school holds that the act leaves an unseen potency, apurva, that bears fruit later. You can reject that metaphysics and still see the method: read the instruction before you invent a moral that the instruction did not say.
Vedanta, the other school that reads the Veda, turns to the later texts and asks about self and ultimate reality. Mimamsa stays with the act. In Ideas they are neighbors, not the same school. One asks what the rite demands. The other asks what the self is.
Where it answers
How should we act?
Dharma is read from the Veda’s injunctions. Ask what the rite itself requires.
Key terms
- Dharma
- Duty as taught by the commands of the Veda.
- Apurva
- An unseen force a ritual creates, which brings its result later.
- Vedic injunction
- A command in the Veda to perform an act, the basis of duty.
- Shabda
- The word as a source of knowledge: here, the Veda, held to have no author and to be valid in itself.
Further reading
- Mimamsa Sutras · Jaimini
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A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Mimamsa.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/mimamsa. Accessed 13 November 2026.