Apauruṣeyatva — the authorless, eternal Veda

The Vedas are not authored by any person — human or divine. They are eternal (nitya), beginningless, self-validating (svataḥprāmāṇya), and the relationship between Vedic words and their meanings is natural, not conventional. This entails: the Veda requires no divine author; the words and meanings of the Veda are eternal entities; phonemes, words, and sentences are eternal even if individual utterances are transient.

Apauruṣeyatva grounds Vedic authority not in theism but in linguistic metaphysics. The Vedas are prior to God — not the word of God. Kumārila's Ślokavārttika devotes extensive analysis to defending the eternity of the śabda (phoneme) against Buddhist impermanence arguments.

Six pramāṇas — especially arthāpatti

The Bhāṭṭa school accepts six independent pramāṇas: pratyakṣa, anumāna, upamāna, arthāpatti, anupalabdhi, and śabda. The Prābhākara school rejects anupalabdhi as separate, accepting five. Arthāpatti (postulation) is Mīmāṃsā's distinctive contribution: the cognition of a fact whose existence is required to make sense of another known fact. Classic example: Devadatta is alive (known) but not at home (observed) — he must be elsewhere. Known not by inference (no explicit universal) but by forced-gap filling.

The debate over anupalabdhi (non-apprehension) between Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara anticipates contemporary epistemology debates: is absence cognised directly (Bhāṭṭa: yes) or inferred from the non-occurrence of positive cognition (Prābhākara)?

Sentence meaning — the Bhāṭṭa/Prābhākara split

How does a sentence generate cognition? Kumārila's Bhāṭṭa school (abhihitānvaya): each word expresses its own independent meaning; sentence-meaning as a unified relational whole is known by a separate subsequent mental act of synthesis. Prabhākara's school (anvitābhidhāna): words inherently express meanings in relational form — the sentence-meaning is primary; word-meanings are derived by analysis.

This split determines how Vedic injunctions bind the ritualist — what "knowing dharma" means for practical conduct. It also shapes all subsequent Indian philosophy of language, including Abhinavagupta's aesthetics and Bharatṛhari's philosophy of śabda.

Dharma, karma-kāṇḍa, and liberation

Early Mīmāṃsā: the goal of Vedic ritual is svarga (heaven) — not permanent liberation. Mokṣa was initially foreign to Mīmāṃsā's concerns. Later Mīmāṃsakas (Kumārila) accepted mokṣa while insisting on the priority of ritual. The ātman is plural, eternal, and the active agent of karma — a direct counter to both Advaita's single Brahman and Buddhist anātman.

Kumārila is reported in Mādhava's Śaṃkaradigvijaya to have debated Śaṃkara's disciples, been refuted, and converted to Advaita at life's end. Whether historical or not, this tradition illustrates the deep intellectual competition between Mīmāṃsā and Advaita for control of Vedic interpretation.