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 3.3.59
Sanskrit text, Unicode transliteration and English translation of verse 3.3.59:
एवमर्थस्य शब्दस्य ज्ञानस्य च विपर्यये ।
भावाभाववभेदेन व्यवहारानुपातिनौ ॥ ५९ ॥evamarthasya śabdasya jñānasya ca viparyaye |
bhāvābhāvavabhedena vyavahārānupātinau || 59 ||59. The object, the word and the cognition being thus distorted, existence and non-existence thus enter into verbal or worldly usage in an identical manner.
Commentary
[The impurity of the object consists in its being coloured by the universal and the like, that of the word in not being able to express the whole object, but only as coloured by some limiting factor or other and that of cognition in being coloured by the external object. Thus any positive entity, when expressed by words or cognised by the mind, appears in the form of some limiting factor. In this respect, it is like a negative entity, which cannot be cognised as such. It can be cognised only as the negation of something. In other words, its nature is determined by something extraneous to itself. It can never be cognised in its own real form. Even though an error is a defect of the perceives, the fact remains that, in an error, three things, the word, the object and the cognition appear in an erroneous form.]