The Rediscovery of Yakṣa and the Problem of Attribution

The Nighaṇṭu–Nirukta occupies a singular position in the early intellectual history of South Asia. As the oldest surviving work of linguistic analysis and conceptual reflection, it stands at the threshold between the ritual-poetic world of the Vedic hymns and the emergence of systematic philosophical reasoning. Yet the identity of its author—Yakṣa—has remained obscured for almost two millennia by a long-standing error of attribution that conflated him with the later scholastic figure Yāska. The recovery of Yakṣa’s authorship is therefore not a philological nicety but an interpretive necessity: without him, the conceptual foundations of early Indian dialectics, hermeneutics, and naturalistic philosophy remain misunderstood. The central argument of this research is that Yakṣa must be restored as the true author of the Nirukta, dated securely between 625–525 BCE, and distinguished sharply from the later grammatical tradition that retroactively absorbed his work. This reattribution clarifies the conceptual originality of the Nirukta, situates it in its proper intellectual horizon, and reveals Yakṣa as the earliest known philosopher of language whose method laid the foundations for later dialectical thought across India and the world.