The outbreak of Advaita revolution inside the camp of Mimamsa radical-
ism is especially clear in the case of Mandana Mishra. Regarded as the third
great systematizer of Mimamsa, Mandana was also known for his grammatical
commentaries, in which he defended Bhartrihari’s sphota theory. Bhartrihari
had worked on traditional Mimamsa turf; his defense of the cult of the
word-Brahman, the identity of God with the syllable aum, was another version
of the old Mimamsa claim for the eternity of the Vedas as an eternity of sounds.
Bhartrihari, however, had pushed the argument into an extreme monist direc-
tion, positing an undifferentiated transcendent unity which degenerates into
the illusory pluralism of words within time. Buddhist interest in the sphota
theory of eternal word-meanings, too, was no doubt one of the catalysts of
Mimamsa creativity.
There are echoes of this debate in the discussions between Prabhakara and
Kumarila. The former held, Bhartrihari-like, that the unit of meaning is the
sentence, and that meanings do not exist apart from it, especially from the
sentence verb, which shows the action which is the basis of the word-meaning.
Prabhakara’s tendency to pragmatism and holism brought him close to Bud-
dhist no-substance doctrine, and earned him the accusation by Advaitins such
as Shri Harsha (1100s) of being “a kinsman of Buddha” (Raju, 1985: 48).
Kumarila replied to Prabhakara, with a characteristically radical pluralism and
reification, that words have fixed meanings before and apart from their use.
For Kumarila, as in the traditional Mimamsa, words are identical with the
letters that make them up; in response to the criticism that words are pro-
nounced differently by different speakers, he argued that the phonemes exist
in their own right, while each utterance is merely their realization (EIP, 1990:
6; Halbfass, 1991: 372). Here, too, Bhartrihari’s influence shows in Kumarila’s
conception of a universal not as a static entity but as a potentiality for
realization in time. Mandana in turn critiqued Kumarila and defended the full
force of the sphota doctrine. Mandana attempted to make this consistent with
Mimamsa realism and its primacy of plural individuals by claiming that the
sphota-meaning can be fully manifested in each phoneme (EIP, 1990: 181); in
effect this opened the way for seeing the empirical world of individuals as
manifesting a transcendental meaning at every point. One step beyond this
would be to declare that meaning a unity, indeed Brahman itself; taking this
step, Mandana became an Advaitin.
The Break from Mimamsa Pluralism to Advaita Non-dualism. Advaita came
out of the Mimamsa network, and initially was identified as a branch of
Mimamsa doctrine. Haribhadra, describing his “six darshanas” in the 700s,
does not see a distinct Vedanta but only “Jaiminiya,” followers of the old
Mimamsa sutra writer. The split in Mimamsa at first went under the names of
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