Short Essay on the Mimamsa Conception of Soul

The conception of soul in the Mimamsa is more or less like that of other realistic and pluralistic schools such as the Nyaya Vaisesika.

The soul is an eternal, infinite substance, which is related to a real body in a real world and it survives death to be able to reap the consequences of its action performed here.

Consciousness is not the essence of the soul, but an adventitious quality which arises when some conditions are present.

In dreamless sleep and in the state of liberation the soul has no consciousness, because its conditions, such as the relation of sense to object, are absent. There are as many souls as there are individuals.

The souls are subject to bondage and can also obtain liberation. In all these respects, the grounds on which the Mimamsa views are based resemble those of the other school, mentioned previously and we need not repeat them here.

Regarding the knowledge of the soul, however, there i something worth mentioning. The Bhatta School holds that the self is not known whenever any object is known. It is known occasionally.

When we reflect on the self, we know it as the object of self-consciousness (aham-vitti). But the Prabhakara School objects to this view on the ground that the very conception of self-consciousness is untepable, because the self cannot be both subject and object of the same act of knowledge any more than food can be both the cook and the cooked.

The functions of the subject and the object are mutually incompatible (karma-kartr- virodha) and cannot be attributed to the same thing at the same time. In every act of knowing an object, however, the self is revealed as the subject by that very knowledge.

It is thus that we can speak of the self as the knower in judgments like ‘I know this pot.’ If I myself did not appear as the subject in every knowledge, the distinction between my knowledge and another man’s knowledge would have been impossible.

The Bhattas reply to this that if the self were revealed whenever an object were known, we would have invariably had then a judgment like ‘I know this pot.’ But this is not always the case.

This shows that self-consciousness does not always accompany the consciousness of an object; but it only occasionally takes place and is, therefore, something different from the consciousness of objects.

As for the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, it is more verbal than real. If there were any real opposition, then the Vedic injunction ‘Know the self,’ and everyday judgments like ‘I know myself would have been meaningless.

Besides, if the self were never the object of any knowledge, how could we remember the existence of the self in the past?

Here the past self cannot be said to be the subject or knower of the present memory-knowledge; an only be the object of the present self that knows it. This haws that the self can become the object of knowledge.

Closely connected with this question is another, namely, ‘How is knowledge known?’ The Prabhakaras hold that in every knowledge of an object, such as expressed by the judgment knows this pot,’ three factors are present, namely, ‘I’ or the knower (jnata), the object known (jrieya) and the knowledge itself (jnana).

All these three are simultaneously revealed (triputijnana). Whenever knowledge arises, it reveals itself, its object and the subject. Knowledge is self-revealing (svayamprakasa) and is the revealer of its subject and object as well.

The Bhattas hold, on the contrary, that knowledge by its very nature is such that it cannot be the object of itself, just as the finger-tip cannot touch itself. But how then do we at all come to know’that we have the knowledge of a certain object?

The Bhattas reply that whenever we perceive an object it appears to be either unfamiliar or familiar.

If it appears to be familiar or previously known (jnata), then from this character of familiarity or knownness (jnatata) which the object presents to us, we infer that we had a knowledge of that object.

Knowledge is thus known indirectly by inference on the ground of the familiarity or knownness observed in the object.