Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/412

 proposition that articulate sounds are eternal, and on the consequent doctrine that the connection of a word with its sense is not due to convention, but is by nature inherent in the word itself. Owing to its lack of philosophical interest, this system has not as yet much occupied the attention of European scholars.

The oldest commentary in existence on the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras is the bhāshya of Çabara Svāmin, which in its turn was commented on about 700 A.D. by the great Mīmāṃsist in his Tantra-vārttika and in his Çloka-vārttika, the latter a metrical paraphrase of Çabara's exposition of the first aphorism of Patanjali. Among the later commentaries on the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras the most important is the Jaiminīya-nyāya-mālā-vistara of Mādhava (fourteenth century).

Far more deserving of attention is the theoretical system of the Uttara-mīmāṃsā or "Second Inquiry." For it not only systematises the doctrines of the Upanishads—therefore usually termed Vedānta, or "End of the Veda"—but also represents the philosophical views of the Indian thinkers of to-day. In the words of Professor Deussen, its relation to the earlier Upanishads resembles that of Christian dogmatics to the New Testament. Its fundamental doctrine, expressed in the famous formula tat tvam asi, "thou art that," is the identity of the individual soul with God (brahma). Hence it is also called the Brahma- or Çārīraka-mīmāṃsā, "Inquiry concerning Brahma or the embodied soul." The eternal and infinite Brahma not being made up of parts or liable to change, the individual soul, it is here laid down, cannot be a part or emanation of it, but is the whole indivisible Brahma. As there is no other existence but Brahma, the Vedānta is styled