In discussions about words and meanings (or objects), and in logical discussions involving terms and their extension, a distinction comes to be made between objects in the world and the signs, symbols, etc. used to denote them. In some philosophical discussions it may not be clear whether what is referred to is the words or their objects, but this question tends to be cleared up fairly soon and also to lead into interesting discussions about what 'exists', whether we can go beyond words to 'reality' and so forth. In the Buddhist schools, because of their initial epistemological and critical preoccupations, a categorical distinction was soon perceived between words and objects. Thus it was found at the outset that some words seemed to have no objects to 'mean', though apparently perfectly at home in everyday language. Consequently it was concluded that such meaningless words should be excluded from philosophical discussion, implying immediately that there were two types or levels of discussion or language, everyday and philosophical, with problems of translation from one to the other. For example, pronouns were found not to refer to anything which could be pointed to as their proper objects. The Buddha himself appears to have been responsible for this initial depronominalisation of Buddhist philosophical discourse, moving on into a thoroughgoing depersonification of discourse. Thus instead of posing meaningless problems such as "who desires?" or "who is conscious?" or "is he who acts the same as he who experiences the result of the action?", one must substitute the proper formulations "through what condition is there desire?" or "through what condition is there consciousness?" or "through what condition does such and such a result occur?" (see e.g. Sam. yutta Nikdya II 13 / Taish6 99 section 15 No. 10; 75f./section 12 No. 18/Niddna Samyukta ed. by Tdp~t.thi, pp. 165-7). The doctrine of 'conditioned origination', without any 'agent' or 'subject' or 'person', is fundamental to all schools of Buddhism. In these discussions the Buddha rejects all such terms (which we would call 'concepts') as 'soul' ('self'), 'life-principle', 'person', 'being' and so on (in Sanskrit