In his Mirror of the Heart, Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka (ca. 900 CE) argues that Ānandavardhana is mistaken to think of rasa as something like linguistic meaning, and instead focuses on the emotional response of the reader (Pollock 2016, Ollett 2020). His argument is that rasa cannot be the kind of thing which is the meaning of a sentence—it is an experiential event which is caused by sentences. Drawing on Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics, which emphasizes how Vedic language causes hearers to follow injunctions, Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka proposes a multi-part process in which the primary meaning function operates in a normal manner, but subsequently there is what Pollock calls an “aesthetic text-event” that unifies the disparate parts of a poem through a generalizing power (bhāvakatva, De 1960 and Pollock 2016). The audience has the ability to enjoy (Pollock: “experientialize”) the result through a particular aesthetic capability (bhojakatva), and the result is a transcendent, rapturous experience of rasa. Though understanding Nāyaka’s account is difficult, given some textual problems, Ollett 2020 argues that his idea of “actualizing” multiple parts of a text has a parallel with the process by which we understand a unified sentence meaning from the parts of a sentence. While rasa is not a linguistic meaning the way that a sentence meaning is, on this understanding, it, like sentence meaning, is something unified understood in dependence on multiple constituent parts.