Two of the three disciplines, Grammar and Philosophy, are identifiable by their relationship to early “root” texts which form the basis of later commentarial reflection. Within Grammar, the aforementioned Yāska, as well as Pāṇini, Patañjali (ca 2nd century BCE), and Bhartṛhari (ca 5th century CE), are a few of the most crucial thinkers whose reflections—on the structure of Sanskrit in particular, and by way of Sanskrit, language in general—informed philosophical reflection on meaning. For instance, Pāṇini’s analysis of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of Sanskrit, in his Eight Chapters (Aṣṭādhyāyī) continues to be cited by philosophers a thousand years later. The literal/non-literal distinction is a topic as well for the various philosophical schools, each one known as a darśana, roughly a “viewpoint.” Both those who accept the Vedas as authoritative and those who do not address the distinction in the context of testimony and theories of reference. Among the former Vedic thinkers, this article primarily treats the Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā philosophical traditions, and of the Veda-denying, the Buddhists and the Jainas. Finally, the tradition here called Aesthetics (alaṃkāra) is primarily focused on the aesthetics of poetry and drama—especially the courtly poetry known as kāvya. It encompasses topics studied in rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics. Alaṃkāra, despite meaning “embellishment” or “ornamentation,” (in reference to figures of speech), studies the psychology of utterances, their ensuing emotional states in audiences, and their logical or semantic structures. Until the highly influential Light on Suggestion (Dhvanyāloka) of Ānandavardhana (ca 9th century CE), aesthetic theory was primarily, though not exclusively, focused on taxonomies of figuration, but after Ānandavardhana, it drew on philosophical work, in particular Mīmāṃsā, to theorize about meaning itself.