  That Kumārila can so often enlist common-sense intuitions in defense of his project, however, might be thought in tension with such surely non-commonsensical ideas as that there is a mysterious “apūrva” connecting the eminently temporal acts of Vedic practitioners to the always “yet-to-be” dharma from which Mīmāṃsakas take their bearings—and in tension, as well, with Mīmāṃsā’s foundational appeal to an essentially authorless corpus of Sanskrit texts. Indeed, Kumārila’s philosophically sophisticated efforts thus to detach characteristically Vedic claims from any finite human perspective can be understood as rather insidious. It is not beside the point to note in this regard that the Mīmāṃsā tradition he advanced can be characterized (as by Sheldon Pollock) as “the dominant orthodox discourse of traditional India” (1989, 604); for it is at least arguably the case that it is precisely the appeal to the transcendent character of the Vedas that secured Mīmāṃsā’s dominance, and that the securing of dominance was just the point of that appeal. That is surely as some of Mīmāṃsā’s critics argued; proponents of the skeptical “Cārvāka” school of thought, for example, argued that the various aspects of the Vedic worldview were all introduced by Brahmins simply in order to secure their own livelihood as the adjudicators of that tradition. Whether or not that represents a reasonable account of the aims of Kumārila and other Mīmāṃsakas, it is surely a defensible view at least that such ideological effects were among the upshots of Mīmāṃsaka influence. Sheldon Pollock has recurrently argued, in this vein, that the dominance achieved by proponents of the Mīmāṃsaka project is reflected in widespread Indic conceptions of authoritative discourse in general—conceptions such as Kumārila himself advanced with his arguments concerning, e.g., the epistemic status of the vast corpus of Brahmanical literature (generally styled smṛti, “tradition”) that extends beyond the Vedic corpus (contrastively styled śruti, “revelation”).