Vakyapadiya

Introduction

Bhartrhari’s main work, a treatise in verse in three books (kandas), probably from the fifth century CE, with a prose commentary that is at least partly his own. The first book presents language as the ultimate principle: Brahman is “word” (shabda), and the world unfolds from it. The second argues that the sentence, not the word, is the primary unit of meaning; individual words are abstractions from it. The third and longest book treats grammatical categories such as substance, relation, time and number. Bhartrhari’s theory of sphota, the meaning-bearing unit grasped all at once, was rejected by Mimamsa and Buddhist thinkers and remained a point of contention in Indian philosophy of language.

Connections

Criticized in

• Shlokavarttikac. 640 · Kumarila Bhatta