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WorkBhartṛhari

Vākyapadīya

Sanskrit grammar turned into a philosophy of mind: we understand whole sentences in a flash, and nothing is known without words.

by Bhartṛhari250 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Sanskrit

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Overview

Near the end of the second book of this work, Bhartṛhari tells how the study of Sanskrit grammar had nearly been lost. Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya, the great commentary on Pāṇini's rules of the language, had been garbled by three scholars he names, Vaiji, Saubhava and Haryakṣa, who followed dry reasoning; the teaching survived among southern scholars only as a text, until Candrācārya and others recovered it and spread it again. The Vākyapadīya is not a commentary but an independent treatise in verse, composed probably in the fifth century, and it argues that grammar is more than a set of rules: it is the study of how anything is known at all. No cognition, Bhartṛhari holds, comes without words, and all knowledge appears as if shot through with them. The unit of meaning is the whole sentence, grasped at once in a single flash of understanding, the sphoṭa; separate words and sounds are pieces that analysis cuts out of it afterwards. The first book goes further. It calls Brahman, the ultimate reality of the Upanishads, the principle of the word: without beginning or end, it appears as the many things of the world. And the book treats grammar as a door to liberation. The second book weighs the definitions of a sentence held by the ritual exegetes of Mīmāṃsā, by the logicians and by Kātyāyana, an early commentator on Pāṇini; the third, in fourteen chapters, treats universals, substance, relation, time, number and gender. Its readers went well beyond the grammarians. The Buddhist logician Dignāga, a near contemporary, made a short treatise on time out of its verses, reworded to serve the Buddhist view that things are produced by consciousness. Centuries later the Śaiva philosophers of Kashmir, Abhinavagupta among them, added a fourth level to the three levels of speech it describes. Its name, roughly "on sentences and words", seems at first to have belonged to the second book alone and later to the first two; the whole is also called the Trikāṇḍī, the three books. A prose commentary on those two books, the Vṛtti, is credited to Bhartṛhari by tradition, though some manuscripts name Harivṛṣabha; the verses are given here without it.

Key concepts

What is sphoṭa?

Sphoṭa, roughly 'the burst', is the word or sentence as a meaningful whole, distinct from the sounds that make it heard. The sounds come one after another and differ with each speaker, fast or slow; the sphoṭa is one and is grasped at once. The sounds reveal it and colour how it seems, but they are not it.

What does pratibhā mean in the Vākyapadīya?

Pratibhā is the flash of understanding in which the meaning of a sentence is grasped as a whole. It is built up from word-meanings yet is something new, which no list of them contains. The book extends it beyond speech: the same inborn insight tells a bird what to do in spring and lets a child act without being taught.

What does it mean to call Brahman the 'word-principle'?

Śabdatattva, the 'word-principle', is Bhartṛhari's name for the ultimate reality: a single, imperishable speech-essence, without beginning or end, that appears as the objects of the world and from which the world's whole course proceeds. On this view, the order of things and the order of language are one order seen from two sides.

What is a universal, jāti, in this book?

A universal is the general kind present in many things, such as 'cow' in every cow. For Bhartṛhari it is what a word primarily names: 'cow' means the kind, and the individual animal is reached through it. The third book goes further and treats the kind as the true element in what we see, the passing individual as the untrue one.

What are the means of action, the sādhanas?

Sādhanas are the roles a thing can play in an action as grammar describes it: doer, object, instrument, recipient, source and location. Bhartṛhari treats them as powers rather than fixed things: any means, once spoken of as acting on its own, can take the doer's role.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

No Knowing Without Words

We usually think we know things first and name them afterwards. Bhartṛhari asks whether it is the other way round, and whether grammar, of all studies, is the way to the highest truth.

There is no cognition in the world, the first book holds, that does not follow words; all knowledge appears as if threaded with them, and even a child's skill rests on impressions of speech laid down before. Brahman is the word-principle, without beginning or end, appearing as the world's many things, so grammar, which purifies speech, becomes a door to liberation. Reasoning has its place, but reasoning cut loose from tradition is called 'dry', and dry reasoning nearly destroyed the grammatical teaching.

  • language
  • cognition
  • linguistic cognition
  • language and reality
  • perception
  • grammar
  • linguistic convention
  • convention
  • meaning
  • sound
  • inference
  • existence

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The Sentence Comes First

Grammar books start with letters and build up to words and sentences. Bhartṛhari reverses the order and asks what we really grasp when someone speaks to us.

The unit of meaning is the whole sentence, understood in one flash of insight, pratibhā, the same power that guides animals and children to act rightly without instruction. Words and their letters are pieces that analysis cuts out afterwards; meaningless sounds cannot add up to a meaning. The sounds we hear only reveal the word, which seems to share their speed and pitch as a reflection seems to tremble with its water. Against the ritual exegetes and the logicians, who build meaning from word-meanings, the second book defends this indivisible whole.

  • sentence meaning
  • word meaning
  • semantics
  • linguistic meaning
  • syntax
  • part and whole
  • context
  • interpretation
  • linguistic analysis
  • morphology
  • compounds
  • word-meaning relation
  • reference

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Time, Number and the Things We Name

Every sentence forces us to choose a tense, a number, a gender and a doer. The third book asks what in the world answers to these choices, and how much of it the mind constructs.

In fourteen chapters Bhartṛhari treats universals, substance, relation, quality, direction, the means of action, action, time, person, number and gender as grammar presents them. Universals are the true part of what we perceive, individuals the untrue part. An action is a sequence of steps the mind gathers into one, and any instrument may be spoken of as the doer. Time is the wire-puller of the world's machine, holding back and permitting, and so dividing everything that happens.

  • time
  • number
  • grammatical number
  • gender
  • grammatical gender
  • universals
  • substance
  • action
  • agency
  • causation
  • instrumentality
  • relations
  • change
  • negation
  • conceptual construction
  • grammatical semantics

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Within this work

passages held
250
distinct concepts
259
by passages held, corpus-wide
#300

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “action” and “grammar”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
actiongrammar12
actioncausation8
causationlanguage8
grammarnumber8
grammarlanguage7
grammarsemantics7
actionlanguage6
causationgrammar6
grammarsentence meaning5
languagenumber4
actionsemantics3
actionuniversals3
languageuniversals3
semanticsuniversals3
causationuniversals2
grammaruniversals2
numberuniversals2
semanticssentence meaning2
causationsemantics1
causationsentence meaning1
languagesemantics1
numbersemantics1
sentence meaninguniversals1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Śatakatraya

    Set beside the Vākyapadīya, his treatise on language, by a tradition that counts both as his; most modern scholars give these poems to a different author.

     SA
  2. Vākyapadīya you are here SA
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