Mīmāṃsā and the Mitākṣarā School of Jurisprudence

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of the concept of ownership in Sanskrit hermeneutical (Mīṃāṃsā) and jurisprudential (Dharmaśāstra) texts from approximately the first millennium CE to approximately the fifteenth century CE. The chapter draws attention to two linked trends in Indian jurisprudential history: (1) the development of a philosophical concept of ownership that occurred in the Sanskrit hermeneutical tradition centuries before the earliest logicians (Naiyāyikas); and (2) the recalibration and redeployment of several arguments concerning this Mīmāṃsā-derived concept by medieval Dharmaśāstra commentators who self-consciously framed their approaches to the jurisprudence of inheritance as further refinements of Vijñāneśvara’s Ṛjumitākṣarā (eleventh to twelfth centuries CE). The core legal and philosophical ideas analyzed are ownership-by-birth (janmasvatva) and ownership as an extra-śāstric (laukika) phenomenon respectively.