Bhavya on Mimamsa: Mimamsatattvanirnayavatarah (An Old and Rare Book)

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We have great pleasure in bringing out this monograph on Bhavya's discussion on the Mimamsa theories, based on chapter IX of his Madhyamaka- hrdaya with the corresponding Tarkajvala by the author himself, in The Adyar Library Pamphlet Series, no. 54. An English translation, and detailed introduction and critical notes by Prof. Christian Lindtner have also been included here. This is a reprint of the article published in The Adyar Library Bulletin, volume 63 (1999).

The complete available text of the Madhyamaka- hrdaya as edited by Christian Lindtner is being published by The Adyar Library and Research Centre. This will be the first Devanagari edition of the complete available text of this important work.

Should one wish to know reasons for wanting to do so and there are certainly good what the Bauddha-s in the sixth century A.D. had to say about the contemporary Darsana-s, one should primarily turn one's attention to Bhavya's Madhyamakah?daya (MH), or Tarkajvala (TJ), chapters VI, VII, VIII and IX of which deal with Samkhya, Vaisesika, Vedanta and Mimamsa respectively.

While the chapters on Samkhya and Vaisesika still call for an editor and translator, the chapter on Vedanta was edited and translated (with extracts from the commentary TJ) by Olle Qvarnström in his Hindu Philo- sophy in Buddhist Perspective, Lund 1989, whereas the chapter on Mimämsä has been the special object of several studies by Shinjo Nobusada Kawasaki, whose recent book Issai-chi shiso no kenkyu, (i.e. Studies in the Idea of Omniscience) Tokyo 1992, contains, inter alia, an edition of the extant Sanskrit verses of MH, i.e. MHK (in all 148 verses) along with the Tibetan translation (167 & 67 'extra' verses) as well as a Japanese transla- tion. (The Sanskrit text of MHK was edited by myself in The Adyar Library Bulletin 59 (1995), p. 37-65, as Yogacaratattvaviniscayah. A complete edition and translation of all the chapters of MHK, Sanskrit and Tibetan, will be published as the The Heart of Madhyamaka. For further references the reader is referred to these works.)