Before Yaska could get on with the work of explaining difficult Vedic words, he first had to answer an argument that the whole project was pointless. Yaska's own Nirukta preserves, in order to refute it, a position associated with an earlier authority named Kautsa, who reportedly held that Vedic mantras exist for their sound and their ritual efficacy alone, that their sequence and phonetic form is fixed by tradition for correct recitation, and that asking what a mantra actually means is a category mistake, like asking what a drumbeat means rather than simply performing it on cue. If Kautsa were right, an entire discipline of Vedic exegesis would have no proper object. Yaska rejected the argument point by point, holding instead that Vedic language, however archaic and however layered with ritual convention, remains ordinary language whose words trace back to verbal roots the same way any Sanskrit word does, so that meaning is recoverable in principle even where centuries of transmission have made a passage obscure. His method, worked out across the text, is to take a difficult word from the Nighantu, the older glossary he inherited, and derive it from a plausible root, explaining the semantic path from root sense to the word's attested Vedic use, an approach later grammarians criticized as sometimes speculative but that nonetheless established etymology as a legitimate and necessary tool of scriptural interpretation. The stakes were not merely academic: a Veda whose mantras carry no recoverable meaning cannot be argued about, applied to new rituals, or built upon by later schools such as Purva Mimamsa and Vedanta, and Nirukta's answer to Kautsa is what makes those later conversations about the Veda possible at all.