  Typifying the “sūtra” genre of mnemonic concision, Jaimini’s aphorisms are often intelligible only with reference to commentaries; the earliest of the completely extant commentaries on Jaimini’s sūtras is that of Śabara (fl. c. 400 c.e.), whose commentary (which itself quotes from at least one no-longer-extant earlier commentary) defines the basic parameters of the tradition’s unfolding. The divergent elaborations of the Mīmāṃsaka project represented by Kumārila and Prabhākara are therefore framed, in turn, as commenting on Śabara’s interpretation of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. It is typical, then, for passages from Kumārila’s corpus to be cited with reference to the section of Śabara’s commentary from which they depart—which effectively means that Kumārila’s topics can usually be referred to by the particular sūtras of Jaimini upon which Śabara was himself commenting. So, for example, Kumārila’s elaboration of the svataḥ prāmāṇya (“immediate justification”) doctrine in epistemology is framed in terms of Śabara’s commentary on Jaimini’s “codanā sūtra”—the sūtra, that is, that specifies that Vedic “injunction” (codanā) is the only valid way of knowing dharma. References, then, to the passages in which Kumārila develops his signal epistemological contribution are typically to the numbered verses of the “codanā sūtra” chapter of his Ślokavārttika.