A commitment to the ubiquitous nature of non-literal speech is seen explicitly in Buddhist texts which pick up on the existing categories in Grammarian and Aesthetic thought, such as cognitive superimposition or metaphor (upacāra), and employ them to undermine the orthoprax theories of language which were realist and referential in nature (Gold 2007 and Tzohar 2018). For instance, the Yogācāra Buddhist Sthiramati, in his Commentary on the Thirty Verses (Triṃśikābhāṣya) (ca sixth century CE), cites a common Grammarian definition of upacāra, noting that use of the term “self” and “things” is an instance of such figurative talk (Tzohar 2018). Not only is the self, when talked about in apparently ordinary ways, really being talked about indirectly, but this is so for all words which, on Sthiramati’s Yogācāra view, refer to an individual’s conscious experience of qualities, and not things in themselves. For Sthiramati, at least, there is a sense in which all language is “metaphorical,” though grounded in the conscious arising and perishing of experiential events, rather than a (putatively) objective external reality.