In this post I will be discussing whether Pūrva Mīmāṃsā counts as atheist and how later traditions reinterpreted the anti-theological arguments to serve their own theological agenda.
Calling Pūrva Mīmāṃsā atheist needs a qualifier attached before it means anything useful, because Sanskrit does not have one word doing the job "god" does in English.
“God” is not a univocal term, as shown also by the fact that it translates different concepts in Sanskrit, from deva/devatā to īśvara and to paramātman or brahman. Furthermore, theism and atheism are not two mutually exclusive alternatives (there might be philosophical positions which neither advocate the belief in a personal God nor support an explicit denial of it). Last, and more intriguingly, belief in God does not need to be configured as belief in the existence of an external, subject-independent entity. Within the precincts of this article, I conventionally adopt the term “deity” to translate devatā; “god” to cover the semantic realm of a superhuman being who has much in common with human beings (not least that they are both, ontologically speaking, “substances”, dravya), and who is mostly the efficient cause of the universe, but not its creator ex nihilo; and “God” to denote a non-human being to whom one has a personal and devotional relationship, but who might have no ontological grounding at all. The second “god” is often referred to as īśvara, although one must be aware of the fact that the three levels I have distinguished here, and especially the second and the third, are not strictly and explicitly distinguished in the sources, which often incorporate aspects I have associated with other levels here (so that, for instance, a God is also referred to as “creator of the world” or as bearing a conch)
Most people assume an Indian philosophical school starts the way early Greek philosophy did, with questions about being and existence. Mīmāṃsā grew out of something narrower: exegesis, plain and simple on the problem of how to correctly read the ritual instructions in the Brāhmaṇa portions of the Veda. Jaimini's Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, likely the oldest surviving philosophical sūtra text in the tradition, comes directly out of that problem, usually dated somewhere around the second century BC, though nobody can pin it down much closer than that. Śabara's commentary followed a few centuries later (dates fuzzy again, somewhere in the third to fifth century AD), and Kumārila and Prabhākara picked it up from there around the seventh century. Eight or nine centuries of commentary, mostly spent on ritual grammar, before the tradition got anywhere near a real theory of what a Vedic sentence is telling you to do.
Mīmāṃsakas held that the entire point of a Vedic sentence, its artha, is something to be enacted, kārya or sādhya, never a fact being reported. Mention a deity in the dative case, an offering made "for Agni," and Mīmāṃsā treats the phrase as ritual grammar but as a subordinate to an injunction about what the sacrificer has to do, with no claim about Agni's existence smuggled in.
However, for Mīmāṃsā the main focus was not on metaphysics, but on the Brāhmaṇa portion of the Veda. Mīmāṃsakas looked at the Brāhmaṇas (and at all of the Vedas) as primarily prescriptive texts. Non- prescriptive passages of whatever nature were considered as subsidiary to the prescriptive ones. Accordingly, for Mīmāṃsakas the artha3 of Vedic sentences is something to be done (kārya or sādhya). This means that the Mīmāṃsā theory of meaning cannot be direct realist. Thus, an interpreter of Mīmāṃsā should be aware of the need to avoid his/her tendency to use direct realism when reading Mīmāṃsā texts. The Veda also has a specific epistemic place and role, according to Mīmāṃsā thought. In fact, the Veda is the only source of transcendental knowledge accepted by Mīmāṃsakas, and in all other fields of knowledge Mīmāṃsā authors stick to a strict empiricism. In Kumārila’s words: “Here like in any other case, Mīmāṃsakas do not accept anything else beyond what is commonly experienced”.4 It is perhaps noteworthy that this sentence is to be understood not in an ontological context, but rather in an epistemological one (discussing the epistemological value of the Buddha’s word). In other words, Mīmāṃsā authors aim to refrain from postulating unrequired concepts, but this does not mean that they naïvely accept reality as independent of the human beings perceiving it. Its existence independent of a knowing subject just lies beyond question, given that the focus is on the Veda and the Veda presupposes the existence of human beings carrying out the sacrifices it prescribes.
Call it an is-ought move if you like: Vedic language gets treated as prescriptive rather than descriptive, and once you've granted that, a deity's grammatical presence inside a formula stops counting as evidence for the deity's independent reality. Add the refusal to posit anything beyond what experience licenses, no god has ever been perceived, a bodiless god can't obviously create anything, an embodied one can't be worshipped in two places at once, and you land on straightforward atheism about devatās. This is the razor doing its work a good thousand years before Ockham put a Latin name on the same instinct.
The devatādhikaraṇa, the actual chapter on deities, builds a real argument against a real opponent to get there. The opponent's best shot is an analogy: you address a deity the way you'd address a guest, and a meal gets prepared for the guest's sake, so the guest matters more than the meal. A second version treats sacrifice as pūjā, worship, and worship is always subordinate to whoever's being worshipped, in ordinary experience anyway. Jaimini keeps the reply anchored to one point.
yajñakarma pradhānaṃ tad dhi codanābhūtaṃ tasya dravyeṣu saṃskāras tatprayuktas tadarthatvāt || 9.1.1 || devatā vā prayojayed atithivad bhojanasya tadarthatvāt || 6 || [...] tasmād yajñaprayojanam || 19 || The sacrificial action is the primary thing, because it has been brought into being by the injunctive word. Hence the preparation of its materials must be regarded as promoted by that [sacrifice], because they occur for its sake (PMS 9.1.1). [Obj.:] The deity should promote [the sacrifice], because s/he is like a guest, for whose sake a meal is prepared (9.1.6). [R:] [...] Therefore, the sacrifice is the promoter (9.1.19).
The sacrificial act is primary, because that's what the injunctive word actually establishes. Everything else the formula names, ritual substances, the deity, serves that act but the act doesn't serve them. Śabara pushes this from grammar into something closer to an empirical test. If a deity genuinely ate an offering the way a person eats food, the material offered should visibly shrink, and it doesn't. The obvious fallback, that a deity only takes the essence of the food the way a bee takes nectar, gets rejected on a nice technical ground: a bee's feeding is something you can actually watch happen. A deity's supposedly isn't, by anyone, ever. Across pages of this, against every Vedic line describing Indra with hands or a strong neck or reddish eyes, Śabara keeps coming back to the same two words.
By Kumārila's generation the target has climbed several rungs, from whether a ritual deity matters inside a sacrifice to whether a creator īśvara, the kind some Naiyāyikas were defending, governs the world at all. Kumārila answers with two arguments that don't depend on each other. First, economy, genuinely the same move Ockham gets credit for centuries later in a completely different tradition: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Karmic retribution among living beings is already fully explained by each being's own past actions.
kasyacid dhetumātratvaṃ yady adhiṣṭhātṛteṣyate | karmabhiḥ sarvajīvānāṃ tatsiddheḥ siddhasādhanam || ŚV, SĀP, 75 If you assume that to govern something means being its general cause, then you prove what is already established. For that (cause) is already established by the past karman of all beings.
If being a mere cause is taken to require a supervisor standing over it, positing that supervisor only proves what was already established without it. Kumārila names this fault directly, siddhasādhanam, proving what's already proven. Second, embodiment. Anything that acts on the world the way a potter shapes clay needs a body to act with, since inert matter doesn't just obey a disembodied will. But a body is a created, extended thing, which means it needs a prior cause of its own, and now you're stuck: either there's a creator behind the creator, or you need creation out of nothing, which Mīmāṃsā's empiricism was never going to swallow. Worth being precise about who's actually getting attacked here. It is not Viṣṇu, Śiva, and definitely an inactive brahman. A specific philosophical construction, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika creator god, and Buddhist philosophers like Dharmakīrti pick up this exact line of attack afterward against a target of their own.
Kumārila’s refusal of this kind of god deeply influenced the Buddhist discussion on the same topic (see Krasser 1999 for Kumārila’s influence on Dharmakīrti) in a way which became more and more philosophically engaged. The target of the criticism is a god/īśvara as part of the ontology of a certain school (specifically of Nyāya and of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika).12 Kumārila (and Dharmakīrti) refutes the idea of using an īśvara as a solution to ontological or logical problems on the basis of the idea that S/He creates more difficulties than S/He can solve. For instance, karmic retribution does not need a divine Supervisor and the assumption of one is anti-economical
The turn comes when Vedānta shows up and "god" stops meaning an ordinary devatā at all. The role climbs to paramātman or brahman, and the old ritual deities get demoted to a merely everyday, transactional level of reality nobody has to take seriously in any final sense. Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta develops inside this shift, fusing more and more with Śrī Vaiṣṇavism, the devotional world of the Āḻvār poet saints plus the Pāñcarātra ritual manuals, so Viṣṇu supplies the devotional centre and brahman or paramātman supplies Vedānta's technical name for that same reality. After Rāmānuja the two are barely separable.
When Vedānta entered the philosophical scene, the situation changed and the role of “god” was primarily occupied by the paramātman or brahman, with lower deities being accepted only at a worldly (vyavahārika) level. Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, by contrast, is a philosophical school which became more and more closely connected to the so-called Śrī Vaiṣṇavism. The latter is a general label used to group Vaiṣṇava beliefs which mostly circulated in and were elaborated on in South India, and which attributed a role also to Viṣṇu’s consort Śrī. On the one hand Śrī Vaiṣṇavism is linked with the devotional songs of the Āḷvārs and on the other with the Pāñcarātra Sacred Texts, which are kind of “manuals” for personal and temple-worship. Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta adds to those beliefs and practices a philosophical, specifically Vedānta, frame. Thus, whereas Śrī Vaiṣṇavism has Viṣṇu as its central focus, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta rather discusses his philosophical counterpart, called brahman or paramātman. In post-Rāmānuja (traditional dates 1017-1137 AD) times the two traditions merge more and more, and theological topics (such as the relation between Viṣṇu and his consort Śrī, and that between Viṣṇu and his body) are dealt with from a philosophical perspective. Thus, theism (here understood only as the opposite of atheism, in the sense of “belief in God”) is a required presupposition of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. However, this does not necessarily imply the belief in a personal God, nor in a saving, caring one. As far as I am aware, the latter characteristics are altogether absent from Rāmānuja’s contributions to Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta stricto sensu (e.g. in his Śrī Bhāṣya, although they might be present in his devotional and Vaiṣṇava works).
What follows doesn't refute the devatādhikaraṇa so much as reinterpret what the chapter was ever trying to do. Yāmuna, then Rāmānuja, argue that Jaimini's apparent sidelining of deities was never a metaphysical denial to begin with. It targeted a specific practical worry: someone who hasn't studied the Upaniṣads yet might conclude ritual duty is pointless if everything ultimately runs on divine grace anyway, and just stop performing the rites their station requires.
aśrutavedāntānāṃ karmaṇy aśraddhā mā bhūd iti devatādhikaraṇe 'tivādāḥ kṛtāḥ
So that people who haven't heard the Vedānta wouldn't lose faith in ritual action, exaggerated statements were made in the chapter on deities. That's the whole move. The apparent downgrading of gods was deliberate overstatement, ativāda, meant to keep people faithfully performing their duties, not a claim anyone was ever supposed to take literally. Veda and Vedānta stop being rival voices and become, in Rāmānuja's own words, a single treatise. Veṅkaṭanātha takes this from pious gloss to full technical machinery. He wants to keep the entire Mīmāṃsā apparatus intact, and not out of sentiment either, its strict rules about valid evidence are exactly what let Vedānta exclude rivals like Buddhism from counting as authoritative at all, so he needs one carefully placed exception rather than a wholesale replacement. His lever is apūrva, the unseen causal residue Mīmāṃsā already needed to explain how today's ritual act produces a result received much later, since act and fruit are never simultaneous and the gap between them is never directly observed. Veṅkaṭanātha identifies this already-accepted, already-imperceptible apūrva with God being pleased by the sacrifice, reasoning that one person's inner intention is never perceptible to anyone else anyway, which is exactly the kind of imperceptibility Mīmāṃsā had already used to justify apūrva in the first place. It's an elegant piece of philosophical judo, honestly, he fills a slot the system had already left open, with a divine mental state where an anonymous causal residue used to sit. He runs the same trick elsewhere too. Created bodies need a cause, except God's, held to be eternal. Embodied beings can't directly perceive dharma, except God, whose perception answers to no such limit.
Thus, Veṅkaṭanātha had in front of him a hard task as he tried to reconcile Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta on this issue.17 The fact that he managed to create a new synthesis is evidence of his genius as a systematiser, wherein the term “systematiser” does not entail a lower order of philosophising. On the contrary, Veṅkaṭanātha had to find a higher synthesis of contradictory positions, one which could still look acceptable to his Viśiṣṭādvaita fellows. Veṅkaṭanātha’s general strategy seems to be to accept the Mīmāṃsā approach (which is useful in order to keep Buddhist and other Sacred Texts out of the precinct of validity) while adding to it an exception, namely God. Thus, Veṅkaṭanātha agrees that bodies are created except for God’s body, which is nitya. 18 Similarly, direct perception cannot grasp dharma (so that it is impossible that the Buddha knew dharma) except for God’s perception. In fact, throughout SM ad PMS 1.1.4, Veṅkaṭanātha shares the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā arguments against the possibility of yogipratyakṣa, and only in the concluding verses does he, surprisingly, add that these arguments do not apply to God. “God” (referred to with the adjective aiśa in the verse) is thus clearly different from a devatābut also from the god Kumārila attacks, since He does not belong to the same categories human beings (puruṣa) belong to; He can have an eternal body, although eternal bodies are inconceivable for us, and can perceptually see dharma, although this is also a priori impossible for other sentient beings. In this way, Veṅkaṭanātha can avoid refuting the Mīmāṃsā stance, while embedding it in a larger frame where a God is indeed possible (this embedding strategy is most likely a distinguishing feature of Veṅkaṭanātha’s approach, see Freschi forthcoming[b]). The Vedānta school usually accept Pūrva Mīmāṃsā theories, but only within the empirical world (loka). Thus, one might think of Veṅkaṭanātha’s move as just part of his general strategy. However, he embraces even transempirical claims of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. Noteworthily, in the case of sacrifices, he makes use of the key Mīmāṃsā concept of apūrva, that is, the ‘unprecedented’, which cannot be known through any other means of knowledge
None of this went through quietly as Elisa Freschi's own conclusion flags real resistance from inside Śrī Vaiṣṇava circles, on top of the outside pushback from Mīmāṃsakas, and by Veṅkaṭanātha's own lifetime there probably weren't any living atheist Pūrva Mīmāṃsakas left to argue with directly anyway. What got carried forward was Mīmāṃsā's technical machinery of exegetical rules, stripped almost entirely of the anti-theological commitments that machinery was originally built to serve.
Genuinely curious what people who've read further into this think, does Veṅkaṭanātha's apūrva move read as a real philosophical continuation of Mīmāṃsā's own logic, or a strategic redeployment of that logic for reasons that are ultimately sectarian. Freschi seems content leaving both readings open. I'm not convinced the text forces a choice either.
Reference
Between Theism and Atheism: A Journey through Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā by Elisa Freschi (2015)
