Bhagavatam-daily 173 – 11.10.15 – Karma-mimamsa accepts the Vedas but defeats their purpose

Varieties thank you the nature of the philosophy of materialist such as Jaimini after explaining how the soul can attain liberation by the process of sadhana bhakti now Krishna talks about other schools of thought that are prevalent in that time and in some morphed versions they are present even now so Jaimini was the propagator of karma mamamsa and karma mamamsa is a is a peculiar blend of sense gratification and eternality normally we recognize that because the body is temporary body sense gratification will be temporary and therefore if we want the eternal we need to go beyond bodily consciousness and recognize our eternal spiritual nature and then we can have eternal happiness Jaimini acknowledges that that there is something eternal that we live eternally but rather than accepting that the soul is spiritual and transcendental to matter the karma mamamsa philosophy holds that the soul is or whatever is the source of consciousness even if the word soul is used or not used that it is naturally meant for sense gratification and if sense gratification is done piously properly according to dharma then one can have an enjoyable life of sense gratification so the whole purpose of karma mamamsa is not to raise the soul’s consciousness to the spiritual level but to just shift the action of the soul from materially adharmic to materially dharmic and dharma here refers not to paradharma not to transcendental dharma but to aparadharma to material religion that enables people to pursue sense gratification in a pious way so dharma artha kama moksha this is the four progressions in four purusharthas the standard in the vedic world view karma mamamsa emphasizes just the three dharma artha and kama dharma is to be done so that artha and kama can be pursued and doing dharma properly so that one can get artha and kama is all that is there to dharma as krishna talks about is in 2.42 and 43 when he talks about the karma kandis he is referring to the followers of jayamayi vedavadratah partham so they argue that there is nothing apart from this apart from what the flowery words of the vedas and what was the word for the sake of kama filled with kama for the sake of wanting to fulfill kama they make swarga their goal getting a lot of enjoyment over there getting good birth and getting bodily abilities and circumstances to do enjoyable activities so they perform various rituals for getting bhoga and aishwarya now in this school of thought knowledge does not come from any eternal transcendental source because the purpose of knowledge is not to attain any transcendental source the purpose of knowledge is to better enjoy the material nature and because material nature is temporary therefore material nature keeps changing temporary in the sense that its manifestations keep changing so the material knowledge will also keep changing but although it keeps changing that changing knowledge will emerge in response to changing circumstances and that knowledge will help one so for example in this particular school its understood that say the beautiful sense objects in this world are temporary so an opulent house an attractive sexual partner these are temporary the attractiveness of the sexual partner or the majesty of the house neither of them going to last but their argument is that okay a particular sexual partner may not stay attractive for a long time but you can have another sexual partner if not in this life in the next life so in the next life also you will have a body and then you will have a sexual partner so essentially and then so if you have a particular sexual partner here then how to woo that sexual partner how to get enjoyment with that sexual partner and not just sex everything else so if we are a particular set of material circumstances we will need knowledge about how to enjoy in those circumstances and that knowledge is what we need and if we go to a different set of material circumstances then we find that we acquire the knowledge that will enable us to enjoy in those circumstances and in this way the knowledge rather than being considered eternal is considered just a relative utilitarian tool for gaining sense gratification and in this way we