The New Math

This chapter explores the first concentrated effort to theorize and defend Madhva’s inversion against traditional interpretive theory. The protagonist of this chapter is Vyāsatīrtha, the great architect of Dualist Vedānta as a major philosophical, social, and political movement under the auspices of the Vijayanagara Empire. Vyāsatīrtha assembles a systematic defense of the power of the closing. He builds his argument out of existing Mīmāṃsā case law, gathering an array of interpretive decisions in which, he argues, it is really the closing that is the deciding factor. He also reexamines the cases traditionally thought to illustrate the power of the opening, demonstrating in each that some interpretive criterion other than sequence really dictates the agreed-upon conclusion. Thus, without actually challenging the existing interpretive conclusions of the entire Mīmāṃsā tradition, Vyāsatīrtha develops (or, in his mind, reveals) a “new math” that both upholds Madhva’s theory and explains a variety of old results.