You have heard a sentence before you have finished hearing it. The last word arrives and something clicks, not at the end, but as if the whole thing was already waiting. Bhartrihari, the fifth-century Sanskrit grammarian and philosopher, named that click. He called it sphota, and he spent the Vakyapadiya, one of the most rigorous texts in the history of Indian philosophy, explaining why it is not a trick of memory but the actual structure of how language works.
