intention of the Sûtra writers is to express themselves with as much
clearness as the conciseness affected by them admits of. The aphorisms
are indeed often concise to excess, but not otherwise intrinsically
obscure, the manifest care of the writers being to retain what is
essential in a given phrase, and to sacrifice only what can be supplied,
although perhaps not without difficulty, and an irksome strain of memory
and reflection. Hence the possibility of understanding without a
commentary a very considerable portion at any rate of the ordinary
Sûtras. Altogether different is the case of the two Mîmâ/m/sâ-sûtras.
There scarcely one single Sûtra is intelligible without a commentary.
The most essential words are habitually dispensed with; nothing is, for
instance, more common than the simple ommission of the subject or
predicate of a sentence. And when here and there a Sûtra occurs whose
words construe without anything having to be supplied, the phraseology
is so eminently vague and obscure that without the help derived from a
commentary we should be unable to make out to what subject the Sûtra
refers. When undertaking to translate either of the Mîmâ/m/sâ-sûtras we
therefore depend altogether on commentaries; and hence the question
arises which of the numerous commentaries extant is to be accepted as a
guide to their right understanding.

The commentary here selected for translation, together with
Bâdarâya/n/a's Sûtras (to which we shall henceforth confine our
attention to the exclusion of Jaimini's Pûrva Mîmâ/m/sâ-sûtras), is the
one composed by the celebrated theologian /S/a@nkara or, as he is
commonly called, /S/a@nkarâ/k/ârya. There are obvious reasons for this
selection. In the first place, the /S/a@nkara-bhâshya represents the
so-called orthodox side of Brahminical theology which strictly upholds
the Brahman or highest Self of the Upanishads as something different
from, and in fact immensely superior to, the divine beings such as