- Lived:
- c. 450–510 CE by the scholarly dating; place unknown — tradition and legend pull him toward Ujjayinī (Ujjain) and the courts of the west, the Chinese pilgrim Yijing toward a Buddhist monastery he kept joining and leaving
- Field:
- grammar and the philosophy of language — the Vākyapadīya; and, under the same name, the Śatakatraya, three hundred verses on worldly wisdom, love and renunciation
- The Big Idea:
- Meaning does not arrive brick by brick, word by word — it bursts on the mind whole, out of the whole sentence; and since no thought happens without language, language is not a tool for describing reality. It is the stuff reality is made of.
- In their words:
- "There is no cognition in the world in which the word does not figure. All knowledge is, as it were, intertwined with the word." (Vākyapadīya 1.123, translated by K. A. Subramania Iyer)
- If you remember one thing:
- Fifteen hundred years before Western philosophy's "linguistic turn," an Indian grammarian argued that thought is language and that the sentence, not the word, is where meaning lives — and the poems that share his name spend three hundred verses failing, honestly, magnificently, to renounce the world.