  It is important to note, with respect to Kumārila’s characteristically Mīmāṃsaka intuitions about language, that the word śabda—which often means “word,” as in the fifth of Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, where it is relations between śabda and referents (artha) that are said to be primordial—is essentially ambiguous between what Saussure distinguished as langue and parole. Thus, the same word can also refer generally to “sound,” in the sense denoting any object of the auditory sense faculty. To that extent, śabda can be understood as referring either to language as such (Saussure’s langue), or to particular, temporally describable occasions of linguistic utterance (Saussure’s parole). It thus becomes clear that arguments for thinking that śabda is eternal will seem rather different depending on which of these senses one takes to be in play. Buddhists, especially insofar as they are typically apt to focus on particular occasions of use, find it obviously true that (as on one favored Buddhist example of a formally stated inference) “śabda is impermanent, because it is produced,” just like artifacts like jars (which we know to be both produced on particular occasions, and essentially impermanent). The Buddhist claim is less obviously compelling, however, if instead one takes it that śabda denotes always already available conditions of the possibility of any particular utterance’s counting as linguistic.