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Abstract

My interest in the topic of Mimamsa and ritual comes from an involvement with the kind of comparative theology that Francis Clooney has been pursuing. I have tried to comment a bit on some of his books, and so it was natural to take a look at his early book, a rather technical one, called Thinking Ritually. Clooney has been concerned with reading strategies in interpretation, and I would say that my reading skill when it comes to Mimamsa and studies of it is very rudimentary. Mimamsa deals with the way grammatical constructions determine the meaning of ritual injunctions. My initial idea was to try to write about this as a ritual ontology. This article will present a few general conjunctions on Mimamsa and Eucharist. The point is to stay as close as possible to the actual texts and practices. I believe this method of doing comparative theology of ritual by limited scale comparisons of actual rites and texts is more productive and revealing then vast generalizations about "the sacred" and "the sacrifice". The Mimamsa tradition occupies an unusual place in the history of Indian thought between "the sacred" and "the sacrifice". Is it a philosophy, or a theory of ritual, or an odd form of mysticism, or something of all three?

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