  Just as texts in the many strata of the Vedic corpus mostly represent themselves as in some sense interpreting the texts that precede them, so, too, the philosophical tradition of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā (henceforth, simply “Mīmāṃsā”), in this regard typifying the generally scholastic character of first-millennium Indian philosophy, developed in the form of commentaries on the foundational texts of the tradition (and commentaries on the commentaries, etc.). Mīmāṃsakas, as adherents of this school are called, thus take their bearings from the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras attributed to a certain Jaimini, who is thought to have flourished near the beginning of the first millennium ce. The first of Jaimini’s sūtras (“aphorisms”) names “the desire to know dharma” (dharmajijñāsā) as the constitutive concern of Mīmāṃsā, where dharma is represented in early commentary simply as what “connects a person with the highest good.” Among the salient points about the goal thus commended by Mīmāṃsā’s foundational text is that dharma, as here imagined, denotes a constitutively future state of affairs; dharma, Mīmāṃsakas typically say, is always “yet to be” (bhaviṣyat).