This is the third lecture in the lecture series Religious Philosophy in Pre-Modern Eurasia: Questions of Translatability organized within the framework of the Cluster of Excellence Eurasian Transformations: Resources of the Past and Challenges of Diversity by the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Center for Religious Studies of Central European University.

The Sanskrit term sattā literally means “existence.” In the Vākyapadīya (Jātisamuddeśa 33–35) of the 5th-century philosopher and grammarian Bhartṛhari, it is described as the “great universal,” the ground in which all words are established and which appears both as substance and as action. Bhartṛhari’s claim that every nominal base and verbal root ultimately denotes sattā shows that “existence” is not simply a fact of being-there but the common condition that language and thought continually presuppose. Translating sattā, however, is problematic. “Existence” sounds too flat and empirical, while “Being” imports European debates—from Aristotle to Heidegger—that alter its sense. Should we retain sattā in its native form, preserving its opacity, or attempt to integrate it into a modern conceptual vocabulary? This dilemma speaks directly to the series guiding questions: whether a shared metalanguage for Eurasian religious philosophy is possible, and if so, whether it can rely on Western categories or requires the decentering of Europe. By following Bhartṛhari’s reflections on sattā and the history of its translation, I argue that the very difficulty of rendering this concept is philosophically productive. It reveals that no metalanguage is neutral: every choice is a perspective, and the work of translation is itself part of philosophical inquiry.