XV · Bhartrihari & Sphota

Sphoṭa (स्फोट) is the word at the heart of Bhartṛhari, though it does not begin with him; Pāṇini (पाणिनि) and Patañjali (पतञ्जलि) used it before, a little differently. Sphoṭa is more than meaning. Ordinary meaning, artha, can be reached by inference, by deduction, by the word of authority; but Sphoṭa arrives without time, a spontaneous flash, the aha that has run through these talks, not deduced but grasped, and grasped in the speaker and the hearer alike. It is not the sound. The sound only carries it, or carries the marks of where it may be found. In the mind the speaker shapes the articulation, the Madhyamā, the speech formed but not yet voiced; then he utters it, and in the uttering the perfect syllables are spoiled, bent by accent, by a missing tooth, by a mouth full of food, by a hundred accidents, into the Vaikṛta, the imperfect sounded speech. The hearer takes in these spoiled sounds and silently mends them back toward the syllables he knows, and out of that mending the Sphoṭa breaks upon him, the flash of what was meant. Say dog as dawg or dag, in any accent you like, and the listener adjusts it in his own inner speech, and the meaning arrives at once.

This is easy enough with a solid thing, a dravya, a dog or a cow or a table; it grows hard with a word like enlightenment, or democracy, or love. And it is the same movement by which we correct all perception: we step into a dark room and leap back from the snake, and when the lamp is lit we see only a coiled rope, and the seeing clears. So with meaning we move, sound by sound, toward greater clarity, and though we begin to anticipate the Sphoṭa from the speaker’s first syllables, we cannot hold the meaning until the full stop, the period at the close of the sentence. The sentence is the meaning-bearer, the irreducible unit, and within it the meaning lives.

Behind the human flash stands its cosmic source. There is a line we may imagine, above which nothing is yet divided and below which time and sequence begin their work of differentiation, manifesting at last the whole world we perceive. That whole manifestation is itself a text, what in my book I called the book of the world; and in the absence of time it rests in potential, a divine pregnancy, the pregnant aspect of Brahman, which Bhartṛhari and Patanjali personify as Īśvara. Īśvara is not the God of the dictionary or of common Hindi. Īśvara is known by the syllable Oṃ (ॐ), and Oṃ is A (अ) and U (उ) and M (ं): the A the syllable of Shiva, of undifferentiated consciousness; the U, formed at the lips, the turn toward manifestation, toward knowledge; and the M the bindu, the full stop, the same dot we set at the end of a sentence and the same that completes a syllable in our grammar. At Īśvara the Sphoṭa is wholly in potential, yet it is there, as light is there, the very analog of enlightenment, understanding while it is still undivided.

From Īśvara the texts of mankind come down, the Śabda Pramāṇa, the Śruti and the Smṛti, not as instruction-manuals or ideologies but as the book of the world set into words by His grace; and on the human scale the one who carries this is the rishi, the guru, the yogi. Then the descent into us: consciousness, which is Puruṣa and the likeness of Shiva, desires to know itself and so objectifies itself as Prakṛti; the omniscient narrows to the specific; and the sense rises that it is I who perceive, the ahaṃkāra, until we reach the ordinary working mind. By this the single cosmic Sphoṭa, which was a way of beholding the meaning of the whole universe, is broken into the small flashes of meaning that visit a human being. And this is why Bhartṛhari calls grammar no mere matter of correct usage but the gateway to liberation. In the first verses of the Vākyapadīya he gives it plainly: grammar is the gateway to liberation, the remedy for the impurities of speech, the purifier of all the sciences, that shines in every branch of knowledge.

And so sacred speech is not simply honest speech or well-meant speech; it is precision, a steady movement toward clarity. In his own vṛtti, his commentary on the Vākyapadīya, Bhartṛhari holds that the corrupt forms of Vāk are a sin, that not all speech is sacred, and that much of the confusion of our lives and our societies rests on the corruption of Vāk, the use of speech that lets ignorance take shape and be passed on. Purified, Vāk makes for prosperity; corrupted, it makes for the opposite, which is why Patanjali insists so on truth, and why the Vedic rishis purified Vāk within the yajña. There is, at the root of it, a compulsion to manifest, the Kāma Bīja, the first desire of pure consciousness to know itself; it is the Mother Goddess who makes the One into the many, and in Her Mahakali aspect gathers the many back into the One. The Sphoṭa carries that same compulsion, the longing of the undivided to make itself known throughout creation. To purify our speech, then, is the very removal of ignorance from our perception of the world and of ourselves.