Jaimini c. 300 BC – c. 200 BC

Jaimini was an Indian philosopher and the founder of the Mimamsa school of orthodox Hindu philosophy, traditionally dated to the third century BC, whose Mimamsa Sutras established the most rigorous tradition of textual hermeneutics in classical Indian thought. Concerned above all with the right interpretation and performance of Vedic ritual, the Mimamsa developed sophisticated theories of language, meaning, and the relation of textual injunction to action that shaped the later Indian philosophy of language as deeply as the work of any school. The Mimamsa Sutras and their later commentaries by Sabara, Kumarila, and Prabhakara are the foundational texts of the school.

Jaimini is the traditional author of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra or Pūrva Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, the founding text of the Mīmāṃsā school of Indian philosophy. Tradition makes him a pupil of Vyasa, the legendary compiler of the Vedas; modern scholarship places him roughly between the third century BC and the first century AD, with several centuries of compilation around a historical core. Nothing of his life is independently known, and even the surviving Sūtra contains references that suggest several hands.

The Sūtra is a long work in twelve books and roughly two thousand seven hundred sutras, devoted to the interpretation of the ritual injunctions of the Veda. Its standard commentary is the Bhāṣya of Śabara, on which the rival sub-schools of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara built their later systems. A separate Jaimini Sūtra on dharmaśāstra topics is also transmitted under his name.

Jaimini's school developed the most rigorous Indian theory of Vedic exegesis, a doctrine of the eternal and non-personal authorship of the Vedas, a sophisticated philosophy of language and meaning organised around the concept of injunction, and the technical concept of apūrva, the unseen efficacy by which a present ritual produces a future result. Mīmāṃsā method became the standard tool of Indian commentarial reasoning far beyond ritual study.