Vakyapadiya of Bhartrihari
by K. A. Subramania Iyer | 1965 | 391,768 words
The English translation of the Vakyapadiya by Bhartrihari including commentary extracts and notes. The Vakyapadiya is an ancient Sanskrit text dealing with the philosophy of language. Bhartrhari authored this book in three parts and propounds his theory of Sphotavada (sphota-vada) which understands language as consisting of bursts of sounds conveyi...
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Verse 2.53
Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation of verse 2.53:
समानेऽपि तु शब्दत्वे दृष्टः संप्रत्ययः पदात् ।
प्रतिवर्णं त्वसौ नास्ति पदस्यार्थमतो विदुः ॥ ५३ ॥samāne'pi tu śabdatve dṛṣṭaḥ saṃpratyayaḥ padāt |
prativarṇaṃ tvasau nāsti padasyārthamato viduḥ || 53 ||53. Even though the fact of being word (śabda, something audible) is common (to both the phoneme and the word), the meaning is understood from the word (conceived as the sequence of phonemes) but not from each phoneme. Hence the meaning belongs to the word.
Commentary
[As audible entities, the phoneme and the word are both śabda but the sentence-meaning is understood from the sequence of the words and not from the phonemes. So sequence is the sentence and interconnection of word-meanings is the sentence-meaning.]
The saṅghāṭa view is now restated.