The Power of Primacy and the Domination of the Injunction: Appayya Dīkṣita’s Two Personas in a Debate about Vedic Hermeneutics

This article is the first study of Appayya Da ksita's Upakramaparak- rama. Here he attacks Vyasatirtha's new and provocative argument according to which the hermeneutic protocols of Vedic passages always assumed that the closing of a passage overrides its opening. Appayya offers a systematic refutation of Vyasatirtha's examples in an effort to show that sequence matters and that, as was known at least since the time of ͆abara, it is the opening that outweighs the closing and not the other way around. But, as the article shows, midway through the work the author presents a new and comprehensive theory that, he believes, underlies both Mimamsa and Vedanta reading protocols, one in which sequence is completely immaterial. The article argues that the tension between these two voices is not entirely resolvable and is, moreover, emblematic of the author's intellectual legacy and of scholarly work in his period more generally.