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 3.7.58
Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation of verse 3.7.58:
एकदेशे समूहे च व्यापाराणां पचादयः ।
स्वभावतः प्रवर्तन्ते तुल्यरूपसमन्विताः ॥ ५८ ॥ekadeśe samūhe ca vyāpārāṇāṃ pacādayaḥ |
svabhāvataḥ pravartante tulyarūpasamanvitāḥ || 58 ||58. Roots like ‘√pac’ denote a part or all the activities spontaneously, even when their forms remains the same.
Commentary
The question is now considered according to the view that the word is the same even when it has more than one meaning.
[Read verse 58 above]
Others, on the other hand, maintain, that even when the meanings are different, the word is the same, if the sounds are the same. In other words, they maintain that the same word can have more than one meaning. We do perceive the word as the same and. nothing contradicts this. The plurality of meaning can be explained on the basis of difference of powers of the same word. In fact, a large number of words in the language have more than one meaning. Even a word like “grāma” stands for different things in different contexts. When in a sentence, the former object of the root ‘to cook’ now becomes the agent the root only means the material becoming soft, as in pacyata, odanaḥ svayam eva. Here the activity of the main agent is not expressed at all. In ‘deva-datta odanaṃ pacati’, the verb expresses primarily the activity of Devadatta (making the rice soft) and secondarily that of the rice (becoming soft).]
Now something further is going to be said about a direct object becoming an agent.