History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c93.84

v7.c93.84

1\. The Mahābhārata and some Purānas state that Jaimini was a pupil of Pārāśarya Vyāsa. But this is said in relation to the transmission of the Sāmaveda to Jaimini and therefore must be confined to that matter alone (and not extended to other matters) in accordance with the mīmāṁsā maxim ·‘yāvad-vacanam vācanikam.’ We have got a Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa, a Jaiminīya Śrauta-sūtra and Gṛhya-sūtra. The tradition about the imparting of Sāmaveda to Jaimini may be true and at present there is no evidence to show that it is wrong. There is, however, no warrant for extending this tradition to the reputed authors of the PMS and the VS. Late medieval writers like Vallabhācārya, whose weakest points were lack of correct knowledge of history and chronology and the obsession to glorify to the skies their favourite authors and works, extended the above tradition about the Sāmaveda to the authors of the two sūtra works,¹⁹¹³ viz. PMS and VS. From the above discussion it follows that the extant PMS is earlier than the extant VS and that the author of the extant PMS could not have been a disciple of the author of the extant VS. The medieval writers failed to pay proper attention to the fact that Jaimini and Bādarāyaṇa are also gotra names and not merely individual names.