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 3.14.26
Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation of verse 3.14.26:
गुणमात्राभिधायित्वं केचिदिच्छन्ति वृत्तिषु ।
अताश्वादिषु सम्बन्धाद् रूढीनामिव रूढिभिः ॥ २६ ॥guṇamātrābhidhāyitvaṃ kecidicchanti vṛttiṣu |
atāśvādiṣu sambandhād rūḍhīnāmiva rūḍhibhiḥ || 26 ||26. Some are of the opinion that in complex formations (vṛttiṣu) (even substance—denoting) words convey quality only, as in the case of words like ajāśva where it is so because of the relation of conventional words with other such words.
Commentary
It is now going to be said that even if a word does not convey substance through quality, it can become a qualifier.
[Read verse 26 above]
[It has so far been shown how words like kṛṣṇa which denote substance through quality become qualifiers. Some hold that they can become so in a compound even if they do not denote substance. In a sentence, the word kṛṣṇa may denote substance through quality. But in a compound, it denotes pure quality, because the word tila has already conveyed the substance through the universal. There is no need now for the word kṛṣṇa also to denote substance. So it expresses quality only and this qualifies the substance conveyed by the word tila. From the word, as a whole, a substance qualified by a quality is understood. The quality is the qualifier. It is like the compound rājapuruṣa where, even though the sixth-case-ending is absent, the meaning of the first term rājā qualifies that of the second. In other compounds also one can see sometimes substance-words denoting quality. For example, in the expression ajāśvo devadattaḥ, if the two terms of the compound ajāśva are understood in their conventional sense (rūḍhi), they would mean two different kinds of animals (substance) and there would be no connection between them. Therefore aja is understood as denoting pure quality, ‘something which has no birth’ and then there would be connection between the two words. In the same way, in the compound kṛṣṇatila, the term kṛṣṇa is taken as denoting pure quality.]
It is now shown in another way that the word kṛṣṇa, expressive of colour is a qualifier.