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 3.14.75
Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation of verse 3.14.75:
अर्थस्यानुगमं कञ्चिद् दृष्ट्यैव परिकल्पितम् ।
पदं वाक्ये पदे धातुर्धातौ भागश्च मुण्डिवत् ॥ ७५ ॥arthasyānugamaṃ kañcid dṛṣṭyaiva parikalpitam |
padaṃ vākye pade dhāturdhātau bhāgaśca muṇḍivat || 75 ||75. It is after seeing the persistence of some common meaning that the word is abstracted from the sentence, the root from the word, and a part from the root as in the case of muṇḍi.
Commentary
[It is the sentence which is stable because it is the indivisible sentence which is expressive. From the particularised sentence-meaning, generalised meanings are abstracted and the verbal elements expressive of them are called ‘words’ and they are grammatically derived. The indivisible sentence cannot be so derived. The abstracted word, with its general meaning, is the same in all the sentences and it can, therefore, be grammatically derived. But the general meaning is abstracted from the particularised sentence-meaning and not that the latter emerges when the general meanings come together. Both the individual word and its meaning are fictions. The word is also artificially divided into parts like root, stem, suffix etc. The process lias to stop at the phoneme. The division of the phoneme would not have even a practical value.]