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Sound, Word and the Limits of Retrospection: The Sphoṭa Passages of Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya Reconsidered

Author(s) Narasimha Ganesh Bhat
Country India
Abstract The doctrine of sphoṭa — the indivisible, meaning-bearing linguistic unit revealed rather than produced by articulated sound — is routinely traced to Patañjali's Vyākaraṇa-mahābhāṣya (c. second century BCE). This paper subjects that genealogy to scrutiny. Working from the received Sanskrit text of the Bhāṣya and from the principal philological scholarship of the past six decades, it argues three related points. First, the textual base for attributing a sphoṭa doctrine to
Patañjali is remarkably slender: the term occurs in a small cluster of passages, principally in the discussion of Aṣṭādhyāyī 1.1.70 and 8.2.18, and there it is applied to the individual speech sound rather than to the word or the sentence. Second, the problem that sphoṭa was introduced to solve in the Bhāṣya is ontological rather than semantic — it answers the question of how a linguistic
unit whose parts never coexist can nevertheless be a single, permanent entity, not the question of how language conveys meaning. Third, the familiar picture of Patañjali as the founder of sphoṭavāda is largely a retrospective construction, produced by Bhartṛhari's fifth-century reworking of the notion and consolidated by the early modern grammarians Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa and Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa. The paper closes by drawing out the methodological moral for the historiography of the Sanskrit grammatical tradition: commentarial canonisation is a historical event in its own right and should not be mistaken for the evidence of the commented text.
Keywords Mahābhāṣya; Patañjali; sphoṭa; dhvani; Bhartṛhari; Pāṇinian grammar; Indian philosophy of language
Field Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In Volume 6, Issue 8, August 2025
Published On 2025-08-06
DOI https://doi.org/10.70528/IJLRP.v6.i8.2431
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