  It is perhaps insofar as he was attuned to such a view of the significance of Vedic language that Kumārila was apt to eschew typically holistic understandings of meaning, and instead to hold the kind of atomistic view on which individual phonemes can be thought part of what is eternal about language. Kumārila was, in this regard, critical of the Sanskrit grammarians’ sphoṭa (“bursting forth”) theory of meaning, which had been elaborated precisely to account for the expression of meaning in light of the manifestly temporal character of linguistic utterance. The considerations here in play are not unlike those that preoccupied Husserl in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1991); just, then, as Husserl was led to venture that the seemingly instantaneous present of consciousness must somehow comprise something of the past and future if we are to account for things like the musical experience of melody, so, too, Sanskritic thinkers had wondered how to account for the dawning of meaning relative to the necessarily temporal unfolding of any sentence one could encounter. At the moment, for example, when the last phoneme of a sentence is uttered, the initial phonemes are no longer present; at what point, then, are we to say that the sentence’s meaning is experienced, and how are we to account for that with regard to the necessarily vanished moments that are involved?