Bhartṛhari

Bhartṛhari (c. 5th century CE) was the greatest philosopher of language in the Indian tradition. His Vākyapadīya (“Treatise on Sentences and Words”) turned the science of grammar (vyākaraṇa), founded by Pāṇini, into a philosophy: language is not merely a tool for describing reality but the medium through which reality appears, and the ultimate reality is itself the Word (śabda-brahman). He developed the theory of sphoṭa — the indivisible “burst” of meaning in which a word or sentence is grasped as a whole — and argued that “there is no cognition that is not accompanied by language”. Tradition also identifies him with the poet of the Śatakatraya (“Three Centuries”), a hundred verses each on love, worldly conduct and renunciation, among the most quoted poems in Sanskrit — though most scholars doubt that the grammarian and the poet were the same person.

The Vākyapadīya

The Vākyapadīya has three books (kāṇḍas): the Brahmakāṇḍa on the nature of the Word as ultimate reality, the Vākyakāṇḍa on the sentence, and the Padakāṇḍa on words and their meanings.

The Word as Brahman

It opens:

Brahman without beginning or end, the imperishable essence of the Word, which manifests itself as objects, from which the process of the world proceeds… (1.1)

Reality is the Word, which unfolds itself into the world of things through its powers, above all time. This is a “linguistic monism”, parallel to — but different from — the Advaita of Śaṅkara, which came three centuries later.

Sphoṭa

How do we understand a word? Its sounds are uttered one after another, each disappearing before the next; yet we grasp the word as a single meaningful unit. Bhartṛhari’s answer is the sphoṭa (“bursting forth”): the indivisible linguistic unit that is manifested by the sounds but distinct from them, and which flashes forth in the mind as a whole, conveying meaning. And the primary unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence (vākya): words are abstractions from sentences, and meaning is grasped as a sudden, unified intuition (pratibhā).

Language and thought

Bhartṛhari’s most famous claim is that all cognition is linguistic:

There is no cognition in the world that is not accompanied by the word. All knowledge appears as if interwoven with the word. (1.131)

Even a child’s first awareness, or the perception of a passer-by who notices something without naming it, contains language in a latent, “seed” form. Language has three levels: vaikharī, audible speech; madhyamā, inner, mental speech; and paśyantī, “seeing” speech — the undifferentiated intuition from which thought and speech arise. Later Kashmiri Śaivas added a fourth, parā, the supreme Word identical with consciousness.

The Three Centuries

The Śatakatraya — the Śṛṅgāraśataka (on love), Nītiśataka (on worldly wisdom) and Vairāgyaśataka (on renunciation) — are short lyric verses of great wit and feeling, quoted throughout India. A famous verse of the Vairāgyaśataka:

In enjoyment, the fear of disease; in high birth, the fear of a fall; in wealth, the fear of kings; in honour, the fear of humiliation; in strength, the fear of enemies; in beauty, the fear of old age; in learning, the fear of rivals; in virtue, the fear of slanderers; in the body, the fear of death. Everything on earth is fraught with fear; only renunciation is fearless.

Influence

The Mīmāṃsakas and Naiyāyikas attacked the sphoṭa theory; the Kashmir Śaivas adopted and transformed Bhartṛhari’s levels of speech; and modern scholars have compared his work with Wittgenstein (the limits of language), Saussure (the sign as a whole), Frege’s context principle, and Heidegger (“language is the house of being”).