Rishi Jaimini

Jaimini was a pupil of Veda Vyasa, who gave him the Samaveda to carry forward. In the Vishnu Purana [III.4], when Vyasa divided the Veda he took four pupils, Paila for the Rigveda, Vaishampayana for the Yajurveda, Jaimini for the Samaveda and Sumantu for the Atharvaveda. He is also the author of the Purva Mimamsa Sutras, the founding text of the Mimamsa school of Vedic interpretation, and the Jaiminiya branch of the Samaveda is named after him.

Two things are held together here that scholars keep apart. Tradition calls Vyasa and Badarayana, the author of the Brahma Sutras, one person, so Jaimini is also described as Badarayana's pupil. The Mimamsa Sutra names Badarayana and the Brahma Sutras name Jaimini, and the relation between the two authors is hard to fix. The Mimamsa Sutras themselves are usually dated about 300 to 200 BCE, long after the age the Puranas give Vyasa.

1. Receiving the Samaveda from Vyasa: in the Vishnu Purana Vyasa takes four pupils to divide the Veda: Paila for the Rigveda, Vaishampayana for the Yajurveda, Jaimini for the Samaveda and Sumantu for the Atharvaveda (Vishnu Purana III.4)
2. The Mimamsa Sutras: the Purva Mimamsa Sutras, in twelve adhyayas and sixty padas, give rules for reading the Vedic injunctions and performing ritual correctly; Shabara, Kumarila and Prabhakara wrote the main commentaries
3. The Jaiminiya Samaveda: the Jaiminiya or Talavakara school of the Samaveda is named for him and keeps its own Brahmana and Upanishad Brahmana, in which the Kena Upanishad is embedded
4. The Samaveda line in the Vishnu Purana: the Vishnu Purana gives his son as Sumantu and grandson as Sukarman, who compiled a thousand-hymn collection and taught it to Hiranyanabha Kausalya and Paushyinji, whose pupils founded the northern and eastern schools of chanters (Vishnu Purana III.6)
5. Questions put to Markandeya: the Markandeya Purana opens with Jaimini asking Markandeya about doubts raised by the Mahabharata, and Markandeya sends him to four learned birds in the Vindhya hills for the answers

The Mimamsa Sutras open with the inquiry into dharma and define it as what the Vedic injunction points to. They are studied to this day in the Mimamsa tradition and are the base text for Shabara's commentary and for the later schools of Kumarila and Prabhakara.

The Jaiminiya Samaveda is one of the three Samaveda schools that survive, with the Kauthuma and the Ranayaniya. Its Brahmana was edited by Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra, and its Upanishad Brahmana by Oertel. The tradition is now small. A 2024 report says that twenty-one Namboodiri families once practised it in central and southern Kerala and that five still do, in Panjal near Thrissur, while a Tamil line is taught near Palakkad. A film made for the UNESCO recognition of Vedic chanting recorded Jaiminiya and Ranayaniya chanting at Thrissur, Honnavar and Gokarna in Karnataka, and Tiruchirappalli.

Two other works carry his name. The Jaimini Bharata, a retelling of the horse-sacrifice book of the Mahabharata, is ascribed to him by tradition, and only that section is known. A text on astrology, the Jaimini Upadesa Sutras, is usually treated as a different and later work.

• Vyasa's hermitage with the four pupils
• A teaching hall of Vedic interpreters
• The Vindhya hills, where the four birds spoke