In Bhartṛhari’s work, the term sphoṭa, meaning “burst,” refers to the indivisible nature of the utterance—it is a sound which carries meaning, and which cannot be subdivided into words or particular phonemes. (One might think here of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, e.g., 1953 [2001]: 191, and the idea of grasping meaning in a “flash”—and indeed, this connection has been explored in Bhattacharyya 2002 and elsewhere.) On one prevailing understanding of sphoṭa, Bhartṛhari is committed to a kind of linguistic monism, which not only denies the divisibility of utterances into grammatical categories, but asserts the identity of speech and reality. Thus any apparent distinctions between categories—letters, words, semantic powers—are illusory. He uses common examples of illusion in Indian philosophy to underscore this point: from far away, a large tree may look like an elephant; at a glance, a rope may appear to be a snake. However, these are misperceptions, as are the putative semantic distinctions we make (Raja 1969).