Gita Rahasya -Tilak 25

Karma Yoga Sastra -Tilak

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY When the two ends,, being the upakrama and the upasamhara, have once been fixed, the intervening line can be defined by the consideration of the arthavada and the upapatti. As the arthavada shows you what subject matter is irrelevant or merely auxilliary, the man who attempts to determine the conclusion of the book, does not touch the several bye-paths when once the arthavada has been determined ; and when once all the bye- paths have been abandoned and the reader or the critic takes to the correct path, the ladder of upapatti like the wave of the sea pushes him forward from stage to stage further and further from the beginning until at last he reaches the con- clusion. As these rules of determining the purport of a book laid down by our ancient Mimamsa writers are equally accepted by learned persons in all countries, it is not necessary to further labour their usefulness or necessity. * [1]on it; and if the judgment contains any statements which are not necessary for determining the point at issue, these statements are not taken as authorities for the purpose of later cases. Such statements are known as "obiter dicta" or " useless statements ", and strictly speaking this is one kind of " arthavada ". G. R._3 Here some one may ask : Did not the various Acaryas, who founded the various cults, know these rules of Mimamsa ? And, if one finds these rules in their own works, then what reason is there for saying that the purport of the Gita drawn by the Mimamsa school is one-sided ? To that, the only answer is, that once a man's vision has become doctrinal, he naturally adopts that method by which he can prove that the cult which he follows is the cult established by authoritative religious treatises. Because, doctrinal commentators start with this fixed pre-conceived notion regarding the purport of a book, that if it yields some purport, inconsistent with their own doctrine, that purport is wrong, and that some other meaning is intended ; and though some rule of the Mimamsa logic is violated when they attempt to prove that the meaning, which in their opinion is the proved correct meaning has been accepted everywhere, these commentators, as a result of this fixed pre-conviction are not in the least perturbed thereby.