  Kumārila’s development of a comprehensive epistemological orientation along these lines is occasioned by Śabara’s commentary on the second of Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. So, having announced in the first sūtra that the “desire to know dharma” is the constitutive concern of Mīmāṃsā, Jaimini then says in the second sūtra that “dharma is a goal defined by [Vedic] injunction (codanā)”—that, in other words, what is epistemically authoritative with respect to what Mīmāṃsakas take to be the summum bonum is just the texts of the Vedas (and more precisely, those injunctive passage that enjoin the execution of particular ritual acts). This amounts to the generally epistemological claim that among the various ways of knowing available to us, the linguistic items that are Vedic texts uniquely represent “reliable epistemic warrants” (pramāṇa) with regard to dharma.