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...
This book contains Sanskrit text which you should never take for granted as transcription mistakes are always possible. Always confer with the final source and/or manuscript.
Verse 2.205
Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation of verse 2.205:
अनर्थकानां सङ्घातः सार्थकोऽनर्थकस्तथा ।
वर्णानां पदमर्थेन युक्तं नावयवाः पदे ॥ २०५ ॥anarthakānāṃ saṅghātaḥ sārthako'narthakastathā |
varṇānāṃ padamarthena yuktaṃ nāvayavāḥ pade || 205 ||205. A collection of meaningless phonemes is either with meaning or without meaning. It is the individual word which is endowed with meaning. There are no parts in a word.
Commentary
The author again speaks about the indivisibility of the sentence and of the sentence-meaning.
[Read verse 205 above]
[The doctrine of indivisibility is challenged as follows—If the individual word is a collection of phonemes, if the phonemes have a meaning, if the word has a meaning, if the sentence is a collection of words and if the collection has a meaning, how can indivisibility be maintained? The vārttika—Saṃghātārthavattvāt (Vā. 12, M. Bhā. I. p. 30, 1. 24.) seems to imply this objection.
It is answered thus—The phonemes are never felt to be meaningful. Nobody has the feeling that the meaning of the word is made up of the meanings of phonemes, just as one seems to recognise in the meaning of the sentence the meanings of individual words. If phonemes have no meaning, they cannot be parts of words because division of the sound part of a word must correspond to the division of the meaning part.
The Vṛtti which is none too clear contains a reference to the Saṅgraha which is said to speak about ten kinds of meaningfulness: tad ubhayaṃ parigṛhya daśadhārthavattā svabhāvabheditā iti Saṅgrahe....]