  Indian philosophers, particularly under the influence of the Nyāya tradition of thought (and of the appropriation and systematization of its main terms of art by the Buddhists Dignāga and Dharmakīrti), were generally preoccupied by Kumārila’s time with the issue of pramāṇas—with the question of which doxastic practices (perception, inference, testimony, etc.) should be reckoned as “epistemic criteria” or “reliable doxastic practices” (as we might render pramāṇa), and with characterizing the criteria so identified. Mīmāṃsā’s Buddhist opponents characteristically affirmed, in this regard, that only perception and inference had this status, and that all other ways of arriving at beliefs were somehow reducible to one of these. Proponents of Mīmāṃsā chiefly affirmed, in contrast, not only that there is an irreducibly and distinctively linguistic way of knowing, but indeed that it is this (and not perception) that should be understood as most significant. For while it is in the nature of perception to bear only on actually present states of affairs—the salient point of Jaimini’s fourth sūtra, on perception, is that this consists in the kind of sensory cognition had when there is contact with something present (satsaṃprayoge)—language alone has the capacity to engender awareness of future, or “to-be-realized” (bhāvya), states of affairs. Insofar, then, as the dharma that Mīmāṃsakas are most interested in is just such a state of affairs, the fact of perception’s bearing only on what is (as it were) ready-to-hand is to be reckoned a deficiency. The epistemological project for proponents of this school thus becomes that of making sense of the unique epistemic authority of the kinds of Vedic injunctions (paradigmatically, “one desirous of heaven should perform the agnihotra sacrifice”) that would not fare well on any account that instead privileged perception.