Vākyapadīya (On Sentence and Word)

Bhartṛhari's verse treatise on the philosophy of grammar, in three books, the first accompanied by a prose commentary often attributed to him. The first book presents ultimate reality as the word-principle (śabda-brahman), from which the world of things unfolds, and argues that there is no cognition that is not interwoven with language. The second book defends the priority of the sentence: its meaning is grasped as a single unit, a flash of understanding (pratibhā), and individual words and their meanings are abstractions that analysts extract from it. Bhartṛhari also discusses the sphoṭa, the meaning-bearing unit distinct from the sounds that reveal it, and surveys rival theories of meaning with unusual fairness. The third and longest book treats categories such as universals, substance, relation, time, number and gender as they appear in grammar.

It makes arguments about holism, context and the linguistic shaping of thought that Western philosophy took up only much later, and it remains the summit of Indian philosophy of language.