The Sphoṭa Theory in the Indic Philosophy: the Ancient versus the Modern (original) (raw)

Since the period of the great grammarians, Pātanjali and Pānini, in the Indic philosophy, the concept of meaning has been a primordial concern. Different philosophers have strived to address the said problem in various ways in cognizance with the philosophy of language ranging from the ancient to the modern. Almost all the schools of philosophy (the Vedic, Buddhist and Jainist) have participated in the deliberation of the origin of meaning in semantics, which encapsulated the larger chunk of the Indian philosophy on language. The mystic, whimsical doctrine of the articulation of sounds (Sphoṭa) and the meanings they respectively convey has been revisited and demystified with a special reference to Bhartṛhari's exponential theory of Sphoṭa. The word sphoṭa which denotes 'bursting, opening', 'spurt' is a vital concept in the Indian grammatical tradition of Vyākarana. It pertains to the problem of articulation of speech and how the mind arranges linguistic units into discourses and meaning. Bhartṛhari propounded the theory of sphoṭa in his seminal book Vākyapadiya: A Treatise on Words and Sentences. He divided the work into three segments: Brahma-kānḍa, Vākya-kānḍa and Pada-kānḍa. Sanskrit sphoṭa is derived from the root sphuṭ 'to burst' which was technically used by the great grammarian Pātanjali to denote to the bursting forth of meaning or idea on the mind with the utterance of the language. Reference is also cited to the grammarian Vyāḍi, author of the lost text Saṁgraha, and he is believed to be progenitor of the idea of the sphoṭa. Pānini refers to a grammarian named Sphoṭāyāna as one of the precursors of this theory. I. In the field of the Sanskrit semantics, analysis of the language into its structural and formal components: vākya (sentence), pada (word), śabda (morpheme), and varna (phoneme), is considered to be in relation to the conveyance of the meaning, which is one of the basic functions of language. Sphoṭāvādins are the philosophers who have dealt with the concept of the sphoṭa. They have been categorized into three categories: Vākya-sphoṭa, Pada-sphoṭa, and Śabda-sphoṭa. The Vākyavādins uphold the idea that the sentence is the meaningful element in a language. Padavādins view word to be the componential meaningful element whereas the Śabdavādins opine that śabda is the basic unit of meaning. One of the branches of Indian philosophy has been engaged in the deliberation of Śabda Pramāna, the semantics of Sanskrit. If the meanings of the words are based on convention,