---
type: Concept
bundle: mimamsa-dharma
bundle_version: 0.10.0
id: arthavada
title: Arthavāda
iast: Arthavāda
devanagari: अर्थवाद
description: 'The explanatory and eulogistic statements of the Veda that praise an enjoined act or blame a forbidden one; subordinate to injunction and read as one sentence with it, NOT independent assertions of fact, NOT literal doctrine, NOT mere decoration.'
darshana:
- Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā
text_source: Mīmāṃsā Sūtra 1.2.1
tags:
- arthavada
- hermeneutics
- ekavakyata
- mimamsa
not:
- term: 'literal factual assertion or standalone doctrine'
  why: 'This is the central and most damaging misreading. Vast stretches of the Veda are praise, myth, and narrative (for example, the wind is called the swiftest deity). Mīmāṃsā holds these are arthavāda: syntactically subordinate to an injunction, present to motivate the enjoined act, and not independent truth-claims to be taken at face value. Reading arthavāda as literal doctrine mistakes the corpus for what it is not.'
  instead: 'Read an arthavāda passage as injunction-supporting praise or blame bound to a vidhi, not as a freestanding assertion of fact.'
- term: 'mere rhetoric or decoration'
  why: 'This understates the role. Arthavāda has a defined hermeneutic function: through the principle of syntactic unity (ekavākyatā) it completes an injunction by supplying the praise that makes the enjoined act intelligible as worth doing. It is subordinate, but it is not idle.'
- term: 'historical record or chronicle'
  why: 'Narrative arthavāda (including much of what looks like history) is valued for its injunction-serving force, not as a report of past events. Its truth-status is governed by its subordination to the vidhi, not by correspondence to a historical record.'
related:
- /concepts/vidhi.md
- /concepts/dharma.md
- /concepts/codana.md
timestamp: '2026-07-08'
okf_version: '0.2'
license: CC BY-SA 4.0
---

# Arthavāda -- अर्थवाद

**Not:** literal doctrine, mere rhetoric, historical record

## What It Actually Means

*Arthavāda* means a statement that speaks to the purpose (*artha*) of an injunction, by praising the enjoined act or blaming its opposite. Classically it is divided into *guṇavāda* (a figurative or hyperbolic statement, taken non-literally), *anuvāda* (a restatement of something already established), and *bhūtārthavāda* (a statement of an accomplished fact that still serves the injunction). The governing principle is *ekavākyatā*, syntactic unity: an arthavāda does not stand alone but forms a single sentence with the vidhi it serves. So "the wind is the swiftest deity" is not a meteorological or theological claim; it is praise that motivates a wind-related rite.

## Why This Is Mīmāṃsā's Great Hermeneutic Contribution

Most of the Veda is not injunction. If every non-injunctive line were read as literal doctrine, the text would be a chaos of myth and contradiction. Mīmāṃsā's discipline is to sort the injunctive core from its subordinate praise, so the whole corpus reads as a functionally unified body of directives with their motivating supports. For an AI system, this is the single most useful thing the school offers: a principled reason not to read Vedic and Purāṇic praise-narrative as a set of factual assertions.

## Audience Metaphor

A recipe that says "this legendary soup will make your guests weep with joy" is not making a claim about tears; the flourish is there to get you to make the soup. Arthavāda is that flourish in the Veda: read for its persuasive work in service of the instruction, not as a fact to be verified or a doctrine to be believed.

## Citations

1. Mīmāṃsā Sūtra 1.2.1 on arthavāda and the threefold division -- see [references/mimamsa-sutra.md](../references/mimamsa-sutra.md)
2. Śabara-Bhāṣya on ekavākyatā and the subordination of praise to injunction -- see [references/sabara-bhashya.md](../references/sabara-bhashya.md)
