History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c93.76

v7.c93.76

We have also to answer the observations of the Naiskarmyasiddhi of Sureśvarācārya (the most famous of the disciples of Śaṅkarācārya himself) that Jaimini does not mean that all passages of the Veda relate to sacrificial rites and that if he really meant that, he would not have composed ‘Śārīrakasūtra’ beginning with ‘athāto brahma-jijñāsā’ and ‘janmādyasya yataḥ’, containing an investigation of the purport of all Vedānta passages, laying bare the nature of brahma and supporting his words with profound reasoning; but that as a matter of fact he did compose such a śārīrakaśāstra. This passage means that Jaimini composed a sūtra work called Śārīrakasūtra on the investigation and knowledge of brahma, which began with two sūtras that were the same as the first two sūtras of the extant Vedāntasūtra.¹⁹⁰⁸ Col. Jacob in his Introduction (p 3) to the first edition of the Naiskarmyasiddhi thought that the Naiskarmyasiddhi made Jaimini the author of the Vedāntadarśana. He is inaccurate, since all that Sureśvara says is that Jaimini composed not only a sūtra work on the Karmamīmāṁsā but he also composed a work called Śārīrakasūtra on the doctrines of brahmamīmāṁsā, but he does not convey that the whole of the extant Vedāntasūtra is the work of Jaimini. Dr. Belvalkar¹⁹⁰⁹ postulates two propositions, viz. that there were brahmasūtras written separately for the Chāndogya Upanisad and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upanisad and other Upanisads for each Śākhā and secondly, that the Śārīrakasūtra of Jaimini was bodily incorporated within and forms the main part of the contents of the present text of the Brahmasūtra. The present author takes strong objections to both these propositions. He cannot go into this question at length here but has to remark that these propositions are based on little evidence. If ‘janmādyasya yataḥ’ was also a sūtra of Jaimini who was specially connected with the Sāmaveda by the Mahābhārata and Purānas, why is it that that sūtra is supposed by the bhāṣyakāras as based on a passage of the Taittirīya-upanisad? The Chāndogya and Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanisads are each nearly thrice as long as all the other eight Upanisads (out of the principal ten Upanisads) and six times longer than the Taittirīya Upanisad. Therefore, these two Upanisads figure largely in the discussions in the extant Brahmasūtra. The 2nd proposition is hardly more than a pure guess. There is no evidence to establish that the main part of the extant Vedāntasūtra is bodily taken from Jaimini's Śārīrakasūtra, when the latter has not come down to us and when no sūtras therefrom (other than the two noted above) are quoted anywhere as from Jaimini's Śārīrakasūtra.