In light of Habermas's recent development of a socio-evolutionary account of the emergence of ritual introduced by the Axial Period, I focus most directly on the communicative ethic of achieving mutual understanding with a second person. I explore potential Eastern Axial contributions to this process providing a microanalysis of the interaction of discursive subjects in four traditions: for Hinduism, epistemic authority; Buddhism, right speech; Confucianism, the rectification of names; Taoism, truth disclosure. For the Hindu dynamic, I will examine the stages in dialectics of the second-personal reversal of social roles found in its axial period scriptures as they detail differentiation of sites of authority. Firstly, the Vedanta scriptures introduce the axial shift from ritual to cognitive transcendence via the rationalization of sacrificial rites. Secondly, the role of the renouncer transcends the worldly orientation of the caste hierarchy. Next, the appeal to Buddhist linguistic proprieties argues that true linguistic claims reflexively point to the moral and ontological status of the speaker more so than merely make factual claims about the world. The Confucian section provides a comparative analysis of its use of normative semantics to that employed by Habermas. Lastly, the Taoist portion of the argument highlights the holistic incompleteness of attempts at final closure upon the procedures and institutional contexts in which communicative action takes place. I conclude with reflections concerning the breadth that the Eastern traditions contribute in their relative comfort with experimental cross-Axial hybrids as compared to Western exclusivist norms of toleration.