Purva (earlier) Mimamsa (or Yajña-Mimamsa, the Mimamsa of sacrifice), and
Uttara (later or higher) Mimamsa, concerned with the doctrine of Brahman
(Chattopadhyaya, 1979: 3:173, 286; Eliot, 1988: 2:310). The latter referred
to commentaries stemming from Badarayana’s interpretation of the Upan-
ishads in the Brahma-sutra. But Badarayana, a possibly mythical figure whose
text may go back to the time of Jaimini’s Mimamsa sutras (ca. 100s b.c.e.?),
was not yet an Advaitin. Badarayana lacked not only the explicitly technical
philosophical argument that Shankara took from his Mimamsa connections,
but also such distinctive doctrines as the ultimate unreality of the empirical
world (Chattopadhyaya, 1979: 3:282–283). It is Shankara who attacks the
practice of treating Purva Mimamsa and Uttara Mimamsa as if they were one
shastra (“science”), and he sharply rejects the doctrines of his Mimamsa seniors
in the process of establishing his own school.
Shankara criticizes all the other schools, Buddhist and Hindu alike. He is
especially hard on Kumarila’s Mimamsa for its pluralism and ultra-realism,
and on Samkhya for its plurality of selves and its material substance. In staking
out the opposite position, Shankara has to walk a thin line in regard to calling
the world an illusion, maya, since this brings him dangerously onto Buddhist
turf; and indeed Shankara is appropriating arguments from Madhyamika and
Yogacara.^55 Shankara’s stroke is to posit a three-level world, rather than two
levels comprising nirvana and samsara, transcendence and world-illusion. The
three levels are (1) the Absolute or Brahman; (2) Appearance; and (3) phe-
nomenal illusion. The second level is our world of ordinary experience; though
it is not ultimately real, nevertheless one can operate in it by the normal
principles of perception and inference. On this level, logical relations continue
to hold, including the principle of non-contradiction, and illusions such as
the rope/snake or logical impossibilities can be detected. Such relations are
transcended only on the level of the Absolute, which lies beyond the subject-
object distinction. Shankara rejects the Yogacara idealism in which the world
is a manifestation of the perceiving subject; as long as one operates on the
level of Appearance, the world is objective and not an aspect of the mind. The
falsity of the world emerges only from the standpoint of the higher Absolute.
Shankara defends not the bald assertion of transcendental monism but the
more nuanced position of ultimate non-dualism.Shankara’s Cogito. Shankara no longer accepts Brahman on tradition but
presents proofs. Shankara’s method, sharpened by the debates of his Mimamsa
predecessors, is essentially epistemological. To doubt something requires that
there be a ground on which doubt arises; to call anything self-contradictory
presupposes something non-contradictory (Brahma-sutra-bhasya 3.2.22). The
argument is a version of the cogito, but instead of proving the existence of the248 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths