Commands and the Doctrine of the Apūrva in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā

This article argues that Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā’s cornerstone doctrine on the apūrva has gone unrecognized in the field, both in terms of the theory’s mechanics and its intellectual history. Śālikanātha (fl. c. 900 CE?) positions the apūrva, the sacrifice’s enduring capacity to trans-temporally produce results, at the top of the language hierarchy within his theory of the archetypal Vedic command: svargakāmo yajeta (‘The man desiring heaven must sacrifice’). Śālikanātha argues against Kumārila (fl. c. 660 CE?), for whom the apūrva is an extra-linguistic postulate. By integrating the ontologically superordinate apūrva within the language hierarchy, Śālikanātha subordinates Kumārila and Maṇḍana’s theories of bhāvanā, ‘bringing into being’, while incorporating their philosophical resources. Śālikanātha’s new doctrine of the apūrva is nowhere to be found in the Bṛhatī of Prabhākara himself (fl. c. 690 CE?). Śālikanātha’s model becomes the baseline for the subsequent textual tradition of Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā, which rises to dominate the field of philosophy of language in his wake.