one single Sutra 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 Sutra 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 Sutra
refers. When undertaking to translate either of the Mima/m/sa-sutras 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
Badaraya/n/a's Sutras (to which we shall henceforth confine our
attention to the exclusion of Jaimini's Purva Mima/m/sa-sutras), is the
one composed by the celebrated theologian /S/a@nkara or, as he is
commonly called, /S/a@nkara/k/arya. There are obvious reasons for this
selection. In the first place, the /S/a@nkara-bhashya 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
Vish/n/u or Siva, which, for many centuries, have been the chief objects
of popular worship in India. In the second place, the doctrine advocated
by /S/a@nkara is, from a purely philosophical point of view and apart
from all theological considerations, the most important and interesting
one which has arisen on Indian soil; neither those forms of the Vedanta
which diverge from the view represented by /S/a@nkara nor any of the
non-Vedantic systems can be compared with the so-called orthodox Vedanta
in boldness, depth, and subtlety of speculation. In the third place,
/S/a@nkara's bhaashya is, as far as we know, the oldest of the extant
commentaries, and relative antiquity is at any rate one of the
circumstances which have to be taken into account, although, it must be
admitted, too much weight may easily be attached to it. The
/S/a@nkara-bhashya further is the authority most generally deferred to
in India as to the right understanding of the Vedanta-sutras, and ever
since /S/a@nkara's time the majority of the best thinkers of India have
been men belonging to his school. If in addition to all this we take
into consid