Mīmāṃsā — How to Read an Injunction
The Upaniṣads say brahman. But most of the Veda does something else: it says do this. Mīmāṃsā is the discipline of reading commands — the first and most exacting hermeneutics.
Dharma is what the sentence enjoins
“Dharma is that whose sign is injunction” — codanā-lakṣaṇo ’rtho dharmaḥ. Something is dharma because the Veda commands it, not because it is pleasant, useful, or obvious. Mīmāṃsā’s whole machinery exists to read the command correctly: what qualifies as a command, what merely praises it, what is incidental.
Two great readers
The school splits into the Bhāṭṭa (Kumārila) and Prābhākara (Prabhākara) readings of how a command moves a person — through a verbal force, or through a direct binding niyoga. Their dispute is technical and consequential: it decides what “following the Veda” means.
What Mīmāṃsā does not ask
It does not ask whether the ritual is pleasant, or what happens after liberation. It asks, with total focus, what must be done, and how do we know the sentence says so. That is why it is one of the four upāṅgas: without it, the Veda becomes a poem.