Sphoṭa
Sphoṭa (
The theory of sphoṭa is associated with
He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages:
- Conceptualization by the speaker (Paśyantī "idea")
- Performance of speaking (Madhyamā "medium")
- Comprehension by the interpreter (Vaikharī "complete utterance").
Bhartṛhari is of the śabda-advaita "
Etymology
While the sphoṭa theory proper (sphoṭavāda) originates with Bhartṛhari, the term has a longer history of use in the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit grammarians, and Bhartṛhari may have been building on the ideas of his predecessors, whose works are partly lost.
Sanskrit sphoṭa is etymologically derived from the root sphuṭ 'to burst'. It is used in its technical linguistic sense by
There is no use of sphoṭa as a technical term prior to Patañjali, but Pāṇini (6.1.123) refers to a grammarian named Sphoṭāyana as one of his predecessors. This has induced Pāṇini's medieval commentators (such as Haradatta) to ascribe the first development of the sphoṭavāda to Sphoṭāyana.
Vākyapadīya
The account of the Chinese traveller Yijing places a firm terminus ante quem of AD 670 on Bhartṛhari. Scholarly opinion had formerly tended to place him in the 6th or 7th century; current consensus places him in the 5th century.[1] By some traditional accounts, he is the same as the poet Bhartṛhari who wrote the Śatakatraya.
In the Vākyapadīya, the term sphoṭa takes on a finer nuance, but there is some dissension among scholars as to what Bhartṛhari intended to say. Sphoṭa retains its invariant attribute, but sometimes its indivisibility is emphasized and at other times it is said to operate at several levels. In verse I.93, Bhartṛhari states that the sphota is the universal or linguistic type — sentence-type or word-type, as opposed to their tokens (sounds).[2]
Bhartṛhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, where he views sphoṭa as the language capability of man, revealing his consciousness.[5] Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, the śabda-brahman, or "Eternal Verbum". Early Indologists such as
Bhartṛhari expands on the notion of sphoṭa in Patañjali, and discusses three levels:
- varṇa-sphoṭa, at the syllable level. George Cardona feels that this remains an abstraction of sound, a further refinement on Patañjali for the concept of phoneme- now it stands for units of sound.
- pada-sphoṭa, at the word level, and
- vakya-sphoṭa, at the sentence level.
He makes a distinction between sphoṭa, which is whole and indivisible, and
Sometimes the nāda-sphoṭa distinction is posited in terms of the signifier-signified mapping, but this is a misconception. In traditional Sanskrit linguistic discourse (e.g. in Katyāyana), vācaka refers to the signifier, and 'vācya' the signified. The 'vācaka-vācya' relation is eternal for Katyāyana and the Mīmāṃsakas, but is conventional among the Nyāya. However, in Bhartṛhari, this duality is given up in favour of a more holistic view - for him, there is no independent meaning or signified; the meaning is inherent in the word or the sphoṭa itself.
Editions of the Vākyapadīya
- K. Raghavan Pillai (trans.), Bhartrihari. The Vâkyapadîya, Critical texts of Cantos I and II with English Translation Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971.
- Wilhelm Rau, Bhartṛharis Vākyapadīya / die mūlakārikās nach den Handschriften hrsg. und mit einem pāda-Index versehen, Wiesbaden : Steiner, 1977, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 42,4
- Wilhelm Rau, Bhartṛharis Vākyapadīya II : Text der Palmblatt-Handschrift Trivandrum S.N. 532 (= A), Stuttgart : Steiner, 1991, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Nr. 7, ISBN 3-515-06001-4
- Saroja Bhate, Word index to the Vākyapadīya of Bhartr̥hari, together with the complete text of the Vākyapadīya (Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1992.)
Reception
Vyākaraṇa
Sphoṭa theory remained widely influential in Indian
The Mīmāṃsakas felt that the sound-units or the letters alone make up the word. The sound-units are uttered in sequence, but each leaves behind an impression, and the meaning is grasped only when the last unit is uttered. The position was most ably stated by
The Nyāya view is enunciated among others by Jayanta (9th century), who argues against the Mīmāṃsā position by saying that the sound units as uttered are different; e.g. for the sound [g], we infer its 'g-hood' based on its similarity to other such sounds, and not because of any underlying eternal. Also, the vācaka-vācya linkage is viewed as arbitrary and conventional, and not eternal. However, he agrees with Kumarila in terms of the compositionality of an utterance.
Throughout the second millennium, a number of treatises discussed the sphoṭa doctrine. Particularly notable is Nageśabhaṭṭa's Sphotavāda (18th century). Nageśa clearly defines sphoṭa as a carrier of meaning, and identifies eight levels, some of which are divisible.
Modern linguistics
In modern times, scholars of Bhartṛhari have included
Notes
- ^ ISBN 978-0-415-16916-5
- ^ a b Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language. Oxford.
- .
- ^ Dominik Wujastyk (1993). Metarules of Pāṇinian Grammar, the Vyāḍīyaparibhāṣā. Groningen: Forsten. Wujastyk notes, however, that there is no early evidence linking someone called Vyāḍi with a text called Saṃgraha that is said to be about language philosophy, and that the connection between the two has grown up through early misreadings of the Mahābhāṣya. Furthermore, the Saṃgraha is mainly referred to for having an opinion about the connection between a word and its meaning (śabdārthasaṃbandha).
- ^
ISBN 81-208-0181-4.
- ^ Gaurinath Sastri A Study in the Dialectics of Sphota, Motilal Banarsidass (1981).
- ISBN 978-0-631-21535-6, pp. 357-358
Bibliography
- Saroja Bhate, ISBN 81-208-1198-4
- Maria Piera Candotti, Interprétations du discours métalinguistique : la fortune du sūtra A 1 1 68 chez Patañjali et Bhartṛhari, Kykéion studi e testi. 1, Scienze delle religioni, Firenze University Press, 2006, Diss. Univ. Lausanne, 2004, ISBN 978-88-8453-452-1
- E. H. Clear, 'Hindu philosophy', in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge (1998) [1]
- Harold Coward, The Sphota Theory of Language: A Philosophical Analysis, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980.
- Alessandro Graheli, Teoria dello Sphoṭa nel sesto Ahnikā della Nyāyamañjarī di Jayantabhaṭṭa (2003), University "La Sapienza" thesis, Rome (2003).
- Alessandro Graheli, History and Transmission of the Nyāyamañjarī. Critical Edition of the Section on the Sphoṭa, Wien: Akademie Verlag, 2015.
- Radhika Herzberger, Bhartrihari and the Buddhists, Dordrecht: D. Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1986.
- Jan E.M. Houben, The Sambanda Samuddesha and Bhartrihari's Philosophy of Language, Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1995.
- Subramania K.A. Iyer, Bhartrihari. A Study of Vâkyapadîya in the Light of Ancient Commentaries, Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute, 1969, reprint 1997.
- Tandra Patnaik, Śabda : a study of Bhartrhari's philosophy of language, New Delhi : DK Printworld, 1994, ISBN 81-246-0028-7.
- K. J. Shah, "Bhartrihari and Wittgenstein" in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Meaning (Vol. I, No. 1. New Delhi.)1/1 (1990): 80-95.
See also
- Nyāya
- Śábda
- Vāc