Memory beyond psychology

Smṛti, usually translated as “memory,” risks sounding disarmingly familiar. In contemporary usage it suggests a psychological capacity: the ability to recall past events or information. In the scholastic Sanskrit traditions, and especially in Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, the term is more exacting. It names a distinct epistemic category, a mode of cognition with its own structure, limits, and, crucially, disciplines of cultivation.

Mīmāṃsā authors treat smṛti as derivative knowledge: it arises from past experience impressed as saṃskāra (trace) and later re-presented. It does not, on its own, yield fresh facts about the world the way perception or inference can. Yet this apparently secondary status—knowledge that comes “after the fact”—is precisely what lets memory serve as a hinge between distant revelation and present action. The Veda, as śruti (that which is “heard”), is fixed and authorless; the ritualist, however, is very much located in time and change. Smṛti is what allows an atemporal injunction to inhabit a changing body.

The same faculty will later be taken up by Vedānta writers with a different inflection. There too, smṛti is not simply factual recall. It becomes a disciplined, sustained recollection—almost a cultivated “holding in mind” (anusaṃdhāna)—through which the knower’s identity slowly tilts toward brahman. In both cases, memory is not merely about the past. It is a tool for producing continuity: of ritual worlds, of ethical patterns, and of a more elusive continuity of self.

Mīmāṃsā: remembering as keeping the sacrifice alive

In the classical Mīmāṃsā picture, the Veda communicates primarily in the form of injunctions (vidhi): “one should perform the new and full moon sacrifice,” “one should offer such-and-such oblation in such-and-such manner.” These injunctions are understood as revealing unseen results (apūrva or adṛṣṭa) tied to the performance of acts. The sacrifice’s efficacy, however, depends on precise compliance with what has been heard. No author stands behind the text to clarify. The text does not change. The only variable is the ritualist.

The Mīmāṃsaka thus inherits a demanding question: how does a finite human agent, whose perceptions are fragmentary and whose mental states are evanescent, reliably reproduce the exact ritual shape prescribed by śruti? Perception cannot keep the Vedic sentence always before the mind. Inference can help reconstruct rules, but only on the basis of remembered particulars. It is smṛti—cognition shaped by past exposure, storing the Vedic sequence as a live potential—that supplies ritual continuity.

The theory of saṃskāra is crucial here. Every hearing of a mantra, every performance or observation of a rite, is said to leave behind a subtle disposition. This is not a metaphor; for the Mīmāṃsā analyst, saṃskāra is a real causal factor explaining why certain contents can reappear in consciousness. When the right conditions arise—often intentionally provoked by recitation or ritual preparation—these traces “ripen” as smṛti: the mantras and procedural steps come back, so that the ritualist can act as if directly guided by śruti.

This is not left to spontaneity. Traditional Vedic recitation practices are, in effect, technologies for building robust saṃskāras. The sheer plausibility of memorizing enormous textual corpora rests on highly structured methods:

• Saṃhitā-pāṭha preserves the text in its continuous, syntactically natural form.
• Pada-pāṭha dissects compounds into individual words, clarifying grammatical structure.
• More elaborate patterns like krama-, jaṭā-, and ghāna-pāṭha re-chain and re-weave words in forward and backward permutations.

From one angle, these are mnemonic devices; from another, they are ritual exercises in temporal control. The Vedic sentence is made to run, reverse, fold back upon itself, and yet emerge intact. Smṛti here is not simply storing content but training the reciter’s very way of inhabiting time. The ritualist learns to navigate the mantra as a structured continuum, not as a series of disconnected utterances. This embodied temporal skill is precisely what Mīmāṃsā counts on when it describes proper performance: the correct sequence must be remembered and enacted without deviation.

Because the Veda is held to be eternal and authorless, its preservation in living bodies takes on a cosmological weight. To remember the mantra correctly is, on this view, to keep alive the cosmic order (ṛta/dharma) that the sacrificial system sustains. Smṛti, disciplined by lineage-specific recitation, becomes the medium by which the timeless form of the ritual continues to shape a world of seasons, crops, social obligations, and post-mortem destinies.

Epistemology and the authority of remembered rules

Mīmāṃsā is often introduced as a theory of scriptural exegesis, but it is equally a fine-grained theory of cognition. Among its central questions is: what kinds of cognition are veridical, and how do we distinguish them from error? In this landscape, smṛti has an ambivalent status.

On the one hand, memory is not counted as an independent, primary means of knowledge (pramāṇa). It is dependent upon some earlier valid cognition—perceptual, inferential, or scriptural. What is remembered cannot exceed what was once presented. On the other hand, memory is inescapably involved in every extended practice. The injunction “one should perform the Agnihotra daily” can be heard only occasionally, yet the duty applies day after day. The agent’s awareness of obligation, on waking each morning, is a remembered awareness. Mīmāṃsā relies on this to account for persistent dharmic identity.

Here the Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara sub-schools partly diverge. Bhāṭṭas tend to emphasize the distinctness of the injunction as a sentence that generates the notion of “to-be-done”-ness (kāryatā) and, with it, a new kind of apūrva potency. Smṛti for them primarily supports the reiterated awareness of that injunction: the sacrificer remembers “I am enjoined to perform this rite.” Prābhākaras, with their doctrine of the intrinsic prescriptivity of sentences, push the analysis more toward the ongoing, tacit sense of being-bound-to-act that saturates the agent’s experience. In either case, memory is not just a pale copy of earlier cognition; it becomes the continuous thread that lets obligation persist as a felt structure of one’s life.

Yet Mīmāṃsā remains wary of granting smṛti too much epistemic latitude. Memory can misfire: we may “remember” what never occurred, or conflate distinct experiences. Such misremembrance is classified alongside illusion. This concern intensifies the demand for ritual training: the more the reciter’s memory is shaped by correct repetition under supervision, the less space there is for corrupt recall. The intellectual debate about smṛti’s reliability thus reflects very concrete anxieties about liturgical purity and the social transmission of duty.

From ritual recall to inward recollection: Vedānta’s turn

Early Vedānta inherits Mīmāṃsā’s tools but bends them toward a different aim. Where Mīmāṃsā takes the Veda’s core purport to be dharma—ritually encoded obligation that yields unseen results—Vedānta traditions read the Upaniṣads as culminating in brahma-vidyā, knowledge of the absolute. Still, the epistemological apparatus remains: a differentiation of pramāṇas, an account of saṃskāra, a definition of smṛti as trace-based cognition.

What changes is the value attached to different uses of memory. Vedāntins do not deny the importance of liturgical smṛti; many were themselves formed in recitation lineages. But they increasingly privilege another function: remembrance as sustained contemplation of brahman or the self. Here, smṛti shades into smaraṇa and anusaṃdhāna—remembering-with-attention, a deliberate, continuous “tracing together” of one’s present awareness with what revelation has taught.

In commentators like Bhāskara, often located in pre-Śaṅkara Vedānta, the emphasis on upāsanā (meditative worship) is strong. Upāsanā is not sheer ritual action, nor is it yet the purely non-dual realization celebrated later. It inhabits a middle space where repeated, focused recollection of a saguṇa brahman (brahman qualified by attributes) shapes the worshiper’s being. The practitioner is instructed to meditate on brahman as the inner self of all, as the support of prāṇa, as the light of lights; to keep this vision alive not only in discrete sessions but as an undercurrent running through daily life.

Here, too, the micro-mechanics of memorization matter. The aspirant learns specific Upaniṣadic passages by heart, recites them, turns them over mentally, attaches them to concrete acts: eating, breathing, speech. The remembered text becomes a lens through which ordinary experience is continually reinterpreted. Over time, the saṃskāras left by this contemplative repetition alter how the world shows up: instead of isolated objects and roles, there is an increasing sense of a single, pervasive reality shining through.

This inward-facing use of smṛti is not entirely discontinuous with the ritualist’s practice. Both rely on repetition, lineage, and carefully controlled verbal forms. Both are intensely concerned with the fidelity of recall. Yet the continuity being protected is now different. For Mīmāṃsā, memory safeguards the continuity of ritual patterns that sustain the world; for Vedānta, it begins to safeguard a continuity of recognition—an increasingly stable sense that the ground of one’s being is not the shifting ego but brahman itself.

Memory, self, and the question of continuity

Both projects hinge on a delicate issue that we could call, without forcing anachronism too far, a problem in philosophy of mind: in what sense is there a persisting subject who can be bound by obligations or attain liberation? Mīmāṃsā, committed to the efficacy of ritual sequences extending over long stretches of life (and beyond this life), needs a robust notion of personal continuity. Yet it is cautious about metaphysical assertions that go beyond the scriptural domain. It suffices that the agent who began the rite, and the one who reaps its result, are linked by a stream of saṃskāras and by the overarching authority of Vedic injunctions.

On this view, memorization practices help stabilize a ritual self. To learn the mantras, to master the procedural details, is not just to accumulate information; it is to be configured into a certain kind of agent. The self is, in part, the one who remembers and can re-enact specific injunctions. Smṛti here underwrites ethical and karmic continuity: it lets past decisions and exposures exert a structured pressure on present possibilities.

Vedānta, while often sympathetic to this framework at the practical level, ultimately pushes toward a more radical revaluation. If brahman is the innermost self of all beings, and if liberation consists in knowing this, then the continuity that matters is not primarily that of an individual agent but of an underlying consciousness. Remembered obligations and ritual identities belong to the sphere of vyavahāra—conventional dealing—where distinct persons act, deserve, and reap. In the emerging Vedāntic picture, smṛti becomes a means of loosening the exclusive hold of this conventional self.

How does this work without lapsing into mere abstraction? Through a kind of double movement. On the one hand, the practitioner uses memory to sustain an integral story of self: “I have heard the Upaniṣadic teaching; I belong to this lineage; I am engaged in this discipline.” On the other, that very story is suffused, via repeated contemplative smaraṇa, with a different claim: “The true I is not this narrative center but the awareness in which all narratives appear.” Smṛti thus plays a paradoxical role. It constructs and maintains a disciplined aspirant-identity, even as it is trained to remember that this identity is not ultimate.

From liturgical exactitude to existential recognition

Seen across these traditions, smṛti emerges as more than a psychological capacity. It is a cultivated practice, a disciplined way of carrying the past into the present so that certain forms—ritual, ethical, contemplative—can endure. In Mīmāṃsā, the success of this practice is measured by liturgical exactitude: has the remembered injunction been faithfully enacted? Does the ritual sequence unfold without deviation, preserving the cosmological order it encodes?

In early Vedānta, the measure subtly shifts. Smṛti is evaluated by the depth and stability of existential recognition: does the practitioner remember brahman not only during formal recitation but in the midst of ordinary perception and action? Have the saṃskāras of contemplation become so firm that even involuntary memory tends to reframe experiences in light of non-dual teaching?

The continuity across these uses is not accidental. Both draw on the same infrastructure of recitation lineages, on the same attention to the fine-grained structure of verbal sequences, on the same theories of trace and recollection. What changes is which continuity counts as decisive: the ritual world, or the recognition of what is said to underlie all worlds.

If we take seriously the idea that memory is shaped—ritually, socially, conceptually—rather than given, then these traditions offer more than historical curiosity. They model two different ways of binding a life through disciplined recollection: one that orients the self outward into a web of actions sustaining a shared cosmos, another that folds the same faculty inward until it becomes a vehicle for recognizing a ground that, on its own terms, was never absent.