XIV · Bhartrihari & Meaning
Tonight I come to Bhartṛhari, who, some seven hundred years after Patañjali (पतञ्जलि), became his great commentator and brought to our subject the one thing held back until now: meaning. Pāṇini (पाणिनि) gave the meta-rules, the architecture of speech; Patanjali, his commentator, applied them in the Yoga Sutra, and there the question of meaning began to stir; and Bhartṛhari, in his Vākyapadīya, one of the most profound texts I know in the whole of the tradition, takes it up directly and grammatically. Here I must mark a parting of ways. The West has thought about speech, since Heraclitus and Aristotle, through the logos, the word as reason, the order of the divine expressing itself outward, as in the opening of John, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. Derrida named this an exteriority, the word arriving from outside as the voice of another, as commandment. Bhartṛhari stands at the opposite pole: for him the word is not outside us and handed down, but interior and beginningless.
For Bhartṛhari the most pristine aspect of speech is the Śabda Tattva, the speech principle, which he identifies with Brahman itself: undivided, whole, that cannot be broken, and yet pregnant, holding within its unity the potency of all its manifestations. And the irreducible unit of meaning, the Akhaṇḍa, is not the word but the sentence; the very title of his work is Vākyapadīya, and vākya is the sentence. Break a sentence into all its parts, its grammar and morphology and phonetics and the meanings of its words, sum every part, and you still do not have its meaning. Something else must enter. The isolated word is an abstraction; pulled from its sentence it goes arbitrary, able to mean almost anything; it comes alive and takes a meaning only within the sentence, and within the understanding shared by speaker and hearer. This is why a translator who reaches for his dictionary to fix the sense of a word in the Yoga Sutra is, by Bhartṛhari’s measure, defeated from the first step.
He gives three images for how meaning is born. The first is the yolk of the peacock’s egg, one indivisible colour, out of which arises the peacock with every colour of the world in its tail. The second is the water wheel, which lifts and turns, for there is sequence in it, and time; and it is time, Kāla, that is the midwife of meaning, drawing the birth of sense out of the pregnant word principle through its sequencing. The third image is illumination, Sphoṭa (स्फोट), from the root meaning to burst open, to bloom, to shine: the sudden arrival of meaning in a sentence. The sound from the mouth, the Dhvani, is not the meaning; it carries the potential of meaning but neither causes nor contains it. The meaning is the Sphoṭa, and it must be present in both the speaker and the hearer, for meaning lives in the listener as much as in the one who speaks.
Bhartṛhari sets out three levels of speech, and they carry this. The first is Paśyantī, speech wholly unified and all but unconscious, joined to the Śabda Brahman (शब्द ब्रह्मन्), holding time only in potential. The second is Madhyamā, speech in the mind, formed but not yet sounded, where the syllables are present as process and are touched by no accent and no particular language. The third is Vaikharī, the actual sounded speech, and here time becomes the full midwife, for the phonemes must now be set in sequence, one after another, in order. A thought may come whole, a sentence or a paragraph in a single flash; but to utter it is to lay it out in time. And the listener waits, holding the sentence open, unable to know its meaning until the final stop, so that speaking is a dance between the speaker building toward completion and the hearer reaching to meet it.
What this means is that meaning can be neither carried by the sounds nor recovered by taking a sentence apart, whether by a translator with his dictionary or by a computer, which can only ask, on its recursive logic, one question after another without end. Meaning needs the flash that no analysis holds, the Sphoṭa, and the assumptions the listener brings; say of a fine performance that it was bad, and the hearer, from the accent and the context, silently rebuilds the sentence and turns the word to its opposite. So meaning is not learned the way a skill is learned. Bhartṛhari holds that speech is innate in the newborn, present from before this life; Chomsky, in our own day, agrees and lays it to the genes. And the whole of it returns to where we have been going all along: the word is beginningless, the imperishable Brahman whose nature is speech, from which objects come and the universe is made. Our knowledge of the world, our very perception of it, arises out of speech; the danger is only that we forget we are its makers, and begin to take the world we have spoken for a reality outside us, as a man might forget that the film he made is a film.
