it with the Buddhists who denied it.  Some sought to establish this authority on the supposition that they were the word of God, while others, particularly the Mima@msists strove to prove that they were not written by anyone, and had no beginning in time nor end and were eternal.  Their authority was not derived from the authority of any trustworthy person or God.  Their words are valid in themselves.  Evidently a discussion on these matters has but little value with us, though it was a very favourite theme of debate in the old days of India.  It was in fact the most important subject for Mima@msa, for the Mima@msa sutras were written for the purpose of laying down canons for a right interpretation of the Vedas.  The slight extent to which it has dealt with its own epistemological doctrines has been due solely to their laying the foundation of its structure of interpretative maxims, and not to writing philosophy for its own sake.  It does not dwell so much upon salvation as other systems do, but seeks to serve as a rational compendium of maxims with the help of which the Vedas may be rightly understood and the sacrifices rightly performed.  But a brief examination of the doctrine of word (s’abda) as a means of proof cannot be dispensed with in connection with Mima@msa as it is its very soul.

S’abda (word) as a prama@na means the knowledge that we get about things (not within the purview of our perception) from relevant sentences by understanding the meaning of the words of which they are made up.  These sentences may be of two kinds, viz. those uttered by men and those which belong to the Vedas.  The first becomes a valid means of knowledge when it is not

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uttered by untrustworthy persons and the second is valid in itself.  The meanings of words are of course known to us before, and cannot therefore be counted as a means of proof; but the meanings of sentences involving a knowledge of the relations of words cannot be known by any other acknowledged means of proof, and it is for this that we have to accept s`abda as a separate means of proof.  Even if it is admitted that the validity of any sentence may be inferred on the ground of its being uttered by a trustworthy person, yet that would not explain how we understand the meanings of sentences, for when even the name or person of a writer or speaker is not known, we have no difficulty in understanding the meaning of any sentence.

Prabhakara thinks that all sounds are in the form of letters, or are understandable as combinations of letters.  The constituent letters of a word however cannot yield any meaning, and are thus to be regarded as elements of auditory perception which serve as a means for understanding the meaning of a word.  The reason of our apprehension of the meaning of any word is to be found in a separate potency existing in the letters by which the denotation of the word may be comprehended.  The perception of each letter-sound