This is a pre-print version of an article published in September, 2021 in the Journal of

Indian Philosophy; please quote only the published version:

DAVID, Hugo (2021b). "Pratibhā as Vākyārtha? Bhartṛhari's Theory of Insight as the

Object of a Sentence and its Early Interpretations"; Journal of Indian Philosophy (online
first); https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-021-09482-1.

The full published article can be legally accessed here: https://rdcu.be/cyJlR

 Pratibhā as vākyārtha? Bhart"hari’s theory of “insight” as the object
of a sentence and its early interpretations

Abstract

This essay offers a fresh interpretation of Bhart"hari’s concept of “insight” (pratibhā),

and of its identification as the object of a sentence (vākyārtha) in the second kāṇḍa of
the Vākyapadīya. Earlier scholars dealing with this topic disagreed on three main
points: (1) whether an epistemologically rigorous concept of insight can be found in
Bhart"hari’s work, or if the notion remains irrevocably vague and equivocal; (2)
whether the concept of pratibhā primarily belongs to linguistics (that “flash” of under-
standing immediately taking place after hearing a sentence), or to action theory; (3)
whether Bhart"hari’s identification of insight as the object of a sentence should be
taken literally or figuratively. Starting from a close analysis of all passages in
Bhart"hari’s work mentioning pratibhā, I identify, first of all, a univocal understanding
of insight, valid throughout the Vākyapadīya, as immediate cognition informed by ver-
bal transmission, in other words as a form of practical knowledge, non-representa-
tional yet essentially productive and dynamic. Showing, on this basis, how Bhart"hari’s
understanding of language at the level of sentences is pragmatic rather than referential,
I demonstrate, against the view prevalent in the late grammatical tradition, that a literal
interpretation of his provocative statement on pratibhā as vākyārtha remains perfectly
plausible. This thesis is further corroborated by the consideration of post-Bhart"hari
philosophical sources elaborating on his ideas (Dignāga, Maṇḍana Miśra), which allow
us better to understand in what sense pratibhā can legitimately be thought of as cogni-
tion “without an object” (nirviṣaya).

2
Introduction1
In a recently much discussed passage of the Abhinavabhāratī, his classic commentary
on Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra, Abhinavagupta draws a striking parallel between the aes-
thetic experience of the spectator at a theatrical play and the cognition resulting from
hearing narrative passages from religious Scriptures.2 That cognition, he says, is what
normally leads one to meritorious acts after hearing such narratives, and it can be con-
ceived of in many ways, depending on one’s theoretical options in the domain of lin-
guistic philosophy; the key passage reads as follows:

This additional cognition (adhikā pratipattiḥ), [obtained] just by setting aside [the notion
of] time conveyed [by the narratives], is of the nature of a transfer [of the qualities of
the characters described in the myth to the listener], etc. and its form is, for instance,
‘May I celebrate [the sacrifice]!’ or ‘May I offer [the oblation]!’ It is given various
names (bhāṣā), depending on one’s [theoretical] viewpoint: pratibhā (“insight”), bhā-
vanā (“effectuation”), vidhi (“instigation”), udyoga (“exertion”), and so forth.3

While Abhinavagupta’s notion of an “additional cognition” (adhikā pratipattiḥ) clearly

echoes Patañjali’s definition of the object of a sentence as an “excess” (ādhikya) of
signification resisting grammatical formalisation,4 the list of “names” (bhāṣā) of that

1
Preliminary versions of this essay were presented at the XVIth World Sanskrit Conference, held in
Bangkok in June/July, 2015, and at the second “Saphala”-symposium in Vienna in December, 2018. I
am especially grateful to the participants of this second workshop for their remarks and criticism. I also
thank Elliot M. Stern for sharing with me, over the past years, advanced drafts of his critical edition of
Maṇḍana Miśra’s Vidhiviveka and its commentaries, Kei Kataoka for providing me the handout copy of
an unpublished article by H. Ogawa discussed in the course of this paper, and Vincenzo Vergiani for
insightful remarks made in the last stages of its elaboration.
2
Abhinavabhāratī on Nāṭyaśāstra 6.31 (prose portion). Text in GNOLI (1968, p. 12-13) and DAVID
(2016, p. 128). For a detailed discussion of the passage in question, see POLLOCK (2010) and DAVID
(2016). The same portion of Abhinavagupta’s commentary on Bharata’s rasasūtra is taken up in OLLETT
(2016), for the most part a defence and expansion of Pollock’s interpretation of this passage in the light
of Kumārila’s theory of “effectuation” (bhāvanā).
3
adhikaivopāttakālatiraskāreṇaiva āsai pradadānītyādirūpā saṃkramaṇādisvabhāvā yathādarśanaṃ
pratibhābhāvanāvidhyudyogādibhāṣābhir vyavah+tā pratipattiḥ. Text: DAVID (2016, p. 128), different
from the text included in GNOLI (1968, p. 12-13). For reasons I explain below, I do not accept R. Gnoli’s
emendation of the reading pratibhābhāvanā°, found in most printed editions of the text, into bhāvanā°
alone. The reading °udyoga°, found in all manuscripts of the text I could access, is also preferred to
Gnoli’s reading °niyoga°, borrowed from R. Kavi’s first edition, on the assumption that Abhinavagupta
is drawing from Jayanta’s list of “sentence-objects” (vākyārtha) in the Nyāyamañjarī. For a detailed
discussion of this point, see DAVID (2016, p. 132-135, especially note 35) and below.
4
See Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya on A 2.3.46: yad atrādhikyaṃ vākyārthaḥ saḥ; “What is in excess here [=
in the sentence vīraḥ puruṣaḥ, ‘The man is brave’] is the object of the sentence” (vol. 1 p. 462, l. 4-5);
also Bhart"hari’s Vākyapadīya 2.42: saṃbandhe sati yat tv anyad ādhikyam upajāyate | vākyārtham eva
taṃ prāhur anekapadasaṃśrayam ||; “But what is in excess [and] different [from the object of individual
words], produced when [words] are put together, is precisely what they call the ‘object of the sentence’,
and it depends on more than one word”. In Patañjali’s (and Bhart"hari’s) words, “excess” refers to what
is conveyed by the sentence taken as a whole, but not by any particular constitutive lexical item, in the
present example the relation of qualification (viśeṣaṇaviśeṣyabhāva) connecting the man and the quality
of being brave. On “excess” as a possible definition of the object of a sentence in the Pāṇinian gram-
matical tradition, see DAVID (2017a, p. 30).

3
cognition given at the end of the text is far less conventional. The first translator of the
passage, Raniero GNOLI (1968), noticed that oddity, and proposed to simply delete its
first member, pratibhā; he notes in his apparatus (p. 13, note 1):

In my opinion prati is simply a note by some reader who has not understood the expres-
sion yathādarśanam, which was later incorporated in the text.

In fact, despite the conspicuous Mīmāṃsaka “flavour” given by Abhinavagupta’s use

of typical concepts like vidhi (“instigation”) or bhāvanā (“effectuation”), we find no
trace of that enumeration in any source (exegetical or other) that would have been
available to Abhinavagupta, except one: Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī. As I have
shown in an earlier article,5 Abhinavagupta’s enumeration closely corresponds to the
list of various conceptions of the sentence-object (vākyārtha) enumerated and refuted
at the end of the fifth āhnika of Jayanta’s work, a list which is not found anywhere
else.6 It is very likely that Abhinavagupta adapts his own list from that of his great
Kashmiri predecessor, incidentally one of the rare philosophers in his time still to men-
tion pratibhā as a possible interpretation of the object of a sentence.

The focus of this essay is precisely that concept of pratibhā which sounded so suspect
to Raniero Gnoli and finally did not escape the Italian master’s philological razor. In
fact, that Jayanta mentions pratibhā as a possible interpretation of vākyārtha does not
make it any less incongruous: “insight”, however we ultimately define it, is a form of
cognition. When we use a sentence like “This is a blue pot”, however, we are not
speaking of any cognition, but of a certain external, non-mental state of affairs. That
state of affairs can, no doubt, become the content of a cognition, but it is not itself a
cognition. This, in substance, is the point Jayanta is making in the following verse,
found at the outset of his examination of pratibhā in the Nyāyamañjarī:

Surely, insight (pratibhā) is a [form of] cognition (vijñāna). It is produced by speech,

but it is not the content (viṣaya) of speech, just as the cognition of colour [is produced]
by the eye [but is not its content].7

A certain number of solutions are considered by Jayanta to counter this very simple
and straightforward refutation, all eventually rejected:

1. Insight is the object of the sentence because there is no other, external object of
that sentence.8

5
See DAVID (2016, p. 132-135).
6
See Nyāyamañjarī vol. 2, p. 135.5-142.19.
7
Nyāyamañjarī vol. 2, p. 141.17-18: pratibhā khalu vijñānaṃ tac ca śabdena janyate | na tu śabdasya
viṣayo rūpadhīr iva cakṣuṣaḥ ||
8
See Nyāyamañjarī vol. 2, p. 141.19: bāhyasya viṣayasyābhāvāt saiva viṣaya iti cet (…); “If one were
to argue that [insight] itself is the content [of the cognition born from hearing a sentence], because there
is no external object, (…)”.

4
 2. The purpose of an utterance is ultimately not to refer to any fact, but to provoke
an action, as in the case of the sentence “A tiger has come”; that sentence is not
aimed at merely informing one about the imminent arrival of a tiger, but at
making one run away from it.9
3. Speech is not only about things existing in the present, but also about past and
future events; therefore, it cannot directly refer to an external object.10

I shall argue here that, despite the relatively expeditious tone of his refutation (hardly
a page and a half in K.S. Varadacharya’s edition of the Nyāyamañjarī), Jayanta is not
fighting a mere straw man, but is actually addressing crucial issues at stake in the in-
terpretation of Bhart"hari’s Vākyapadīya (5th century, henceforth VP), our main source
for the theory of pratibhā as vākyārtha. After examining, first of all, the state of the
question in contemporary literature on Bhart"hari (Section 1) I will gather, once again,
Bhart"hari’s main statements about pratibhā in the VP, and examine against this back-
ground his specific use of that concept for linguistic philosophy (Section 2). Having
concluded that a coherent, univocal concept of “insight” exists in the VP, I shall look
for a precise epistemological characterisation of that concept, relying on later interpre-
tations of Bhart"hari’s theory of pratibhā, especially those of its main two interpreters
in the 6th and 7th century: Dignāga and Maṇḍana Miśra. While Maṇḍana polemically
discusses Bhart"hari’s theory of pratibhā in the framework of a general theory of ac-
tion and motivation, Dignāga draws all the consequences from Bhart"hari’s identifica-
tion of insight as the object of all linguistic utterances (Section 3). Building on these
Bhart"harian as well as post-Bhart"harian materials, I will finally consider Jayanta’s
characterisation of pratibhā as “cognition without an external content” (abāhya-
viṣayaṃ vijñānam) to be a possible, and at any rate coherent, philosophical interpreta-
tion of Bhart"hari’s conception of the object of a sentence. I will also argue that it
faithfully reflects a pragmatic interpretation of language, quite unique to the author of
the VP and still recognisable in Jayanta’s words although it had already by his time
fallen in relative desuetude.11
9
See Nyāyamañjarī vol. 2, p. 142.1-2: yo ’pi ‘vyāghra āyātaḥ’ ity ukte śūrakātarādhikaraṇa-
nānākārakāryotpādaḥ (…); “Even the production of instigations of varying forms for a courageous man
or a coward upon hearing [the sentence] ‘A tiger has come’ (…)”.
10
See Nyāyamañjarī vol. 2, p. 142.4: arthas tadānīṃ nāstīti cet (…); “If one were to object that the
object does not exist at the time [of the utterance], (…)”.
11
During the presentation of this essay in Vienna in December, 2018, I became aware thanks to my
Japanese colleagues that a paper on the topic of pratibhā in Bhart"hari’s Vākyapadīya had been pre-
sented by Hideyo Ogawa at a conference in Matsumoto in 2012 (OGAWA 2012a). This article, of which
I could obtain a copy in the form of a handout distributed at the Matsumoto conference, is to this date
still unpublished, and it is not impossible that its author would have liked to produce a revised version
of it before publication. However, the views presented therein appear to be coherent with Ogawa’s
published work on the topic of vākyārtha (see especially OGAWA 2004-2005, 2012b and 2012c), and
are too radically opposed to those advocated here to be simply ignored. In Ogawa’s opinion, Bhart"hari
never held the view that pratibhā is identical with the object of a sentence. According to him, that wrong
identification would be the work of later authors and commentators on the Vākyapadīya, first among
whom Puṇyarāja, the second-millennium commentator on the second kāṇḍa, who “fails to grasp the
concept of pratibhā as conceived by Bhart"hari”, and by whom most modern interpreters of his thought
would have been misled (p. 1-2). According to Ogawa, “the pratibhā is a sentence meaning (sic) and a

5
Section 1 – what did Bhart#hari mean by pratibhā?
The concept of pratibhā (“intuition”, “insight”) occupies, as is well-known, a central
position in Bhart"hari’s theory of the sentence (vākya) and the sentence object (vākyār-
tha) in the second kāṇḍa of the VP. The specific consideration of the object (artha) of
a sentence begins with k. 2.41-42, where Bhart"hari draws a broad distinction between
what is expressed by a word taken in isolation even while remaining an integral part
of a sentence (keval[am] vākyasthaṃ padam – VP 2.41) and that “excess” (ādhikya) of
signification specifically conveyed by that sentence (VP 2.42).12 This investigation
which, following Bhart"hari’s custom in the Vākyapadīya, starts with a fresh assess-
ment of early grammarians’ positions on the topic, spans over more than a hundred
verses, less than thirty-five of which have been transmitted along with the auto-com-
mentary (Svav+tti, henceforth SV).13 The section culminates in the discussion of “in-
sight” (pratibhā) in VP 2.143-152, and the seeming identification of pratibhā with the
object of the sentence in VP 2.143-145:

Once the objects [of individual words] have been grasped in separation, an altogether
different insight (pratibhā) arises; they say that this [insight], made possible by the word-
objects, is the object of the sentence (vākyartha) (2.143). It cannot be explained to others,
[as when we say] “this is such and such”; established as it is by its abiding in one’s own
self, it cannot be described even by him who has it (2.144). Without any reflection it
creates, so to say, a fusion of word-objects; having seemingly taken the form of all of
14
them, it stands as the content (viṣaya) [of verbal cognition]. (2.145)

sentence meaning is simply a fusion (saṃsarga) from which the elements of word meanings (padārtha)
are abstracted (apoddhāra)” (ibid.). Thus, the view of pratibhā as the object of the sentence would have
been held neither by Bhart"hari nor by his 10th-century commentator Helārāja, as “either in the extant
V"tti or in the Prakāśa of Helārāja (…) there is no indication that a sentence meaning is a pratibhā” (p.
1). The detail of Ogawa’s arguments in support of this view will be discussed in the course of this article,
on the occasion of the discussion of particular text-passages.
12
On Patañjali’s notion of ādhikya, taken up by Bhart"hari in VP 2.42, see above n. 3.
13
Needless to say, this tentative (and, no doubt, somewhat artificial) identification of a separate “sec-
tion” of the second kāṇḍa dealing with the definition of the vākyārtha does not conform to Puṇyarāja’s
understanding of the structure of the text, and rather follows the lead provided by Bhart"hari’s auto-
commentary, unfortunately missing for the portion VP 2.77-151 (only one fragment of the SV on VP
2.87 appears to have survived). According to Puṇyarāja, k. 2.41-48 would deal with a specific variety
of the so-called saṃghātapakṣa (“view of the aggregate”), anachronistically connected to Kumārila’s
views on the sentence: idānīm abhihitānvayapakṣasamāśrayaṇena saṃghātapakṣasya pradarśanāyāha
(…); “Now, in order to expose the ‘view of the aggregate’ (saṃghātapakṣa) by relying on the view of
the connection of [objects] that have [already] been expressed (abhihitānvayapakṣa), he says: (…)” (VP-
Ṭīkā p. 19.17; introduction to VP 2.41-42). In other words, following Puṇyarāja, Bhart"hari would not
be reiterating the ancient Pāṇinīyas’ distinction between padārtha and vākyārtha before starting his own
investigation on the topic; he would rather be discussing the second in the list of eight sentence-defini-
tions given in VP 2.1, according to which the sentence is “an aggregate of lexical units” (śabdasaṃghāta
– VP 2.1a). This difference of interpretation should, of course, not deter us from trying to understand
Bhart"hari’s text in its own terms, but it gives us a measure of the kind of difficulty we face when trying
to apprehend the complex structure of the second kāṇḍa.
14
vicchedagrahaṇe ’rthānāṃ pratibhānyaiva jāyate | vākyārtha iti tām āhuḥ padārthair upapāditam ||
2.143 || idaṃ tad iti sānyeṣām anākhyeyā kathaṃ cana | pratyātmav+ttisiddhā <em: °v+tti siddhā RAU>

6
All modern interpreters of the VP agree on the importance of these statements for
Bhart"hari’s philosophy of language, but they widely diverge as to their precise inter-
pretation, the exact epistemological value of pratibhā in the second kāṇḍa, and its re-
lation to the “metaphysics” of pratibhā developed in the first kāṇḍa.

According to a frequent interpretation, pratibhā should be understood primarily as a

linguistic concept. Following its classical description by K.A. Subramania Iyer, prati-
bhā would be that “flash of understanding of the meaning of the whole sentence” tak-
ing place in the listener after he has understood the general meaning of the individual
words.15 The metaphor of luminosity attached to the Sanskrit word pratibhā would
simply account for the immediate, non-reflective and non-discursive character of lin-
guistic comprehension, and for its distinction from a mere combination of individual
word-objects in the listener’s mind. These characteristics of “linguistic” pratibhā fur-
ther allowed modern interpreters following Iyer’s lead to build a bridge with the idea
of pratibhā, in the first kāṇḍa, as “the origin of the modifications of speech” (vāg-
vikārāṇāṃ prak+ti[ḥ] – VPSV 1.14 [p. 48.1]) in connection with Bhart"hari’s theory
of liberation16: just as pratibhā allows one to overcome differences produced by the

sā kartrāpi na nirūpyate || 2.144 || upaśleṣam ivārthānāṃ sā karoty avicāritā | sārvarūpyam ivāpannā

viṣayatvena vartate || 2.145 ||. All quotations of VP-kārikās follow the text of their critical edition by W.
RAU (1977). Numeration of verses follows the edition of K.A. Subramania Iyer, with Rau’s numeration
given in brackets whenever different. The whole section of the second kāṇḍa on pratibhā (VP 2.143-
151/152) has been translated in BIARDEAU (1964b, p. 316-317), IYER (1977, p. 60-63), AKAMATSU
(1998) and RAU (2000, p. 74-76), and discussed in RAJA (1963, p. 224-227), GONDA (1963, p. 339-340),
BIARDEAU (1964b, p. 315-329), IYER (1969, p. 86-93 and 187), AKLUJKAR (1989b, p. 155-156), TOLA
& DRAGONETTI (1990), AKAMATSU (1994), PRASAD (2010) and OGAWA (2012a). TORELLA (2013, p.
465) briefly mentions this passage, which he quotes in Iyer’s English translation. Despite differences in
the rendering of Bhart"hari’s sometimes elliptical expressions, my translation essentially agrees with
Iyer and Rau’s understanding of the text. The interpretation of the passage proposed by OGAWA (2012a),
on the other hand, largely differs from that of his predecessors: “When [different] things have been
separately understood, there arises a pratibhā as something totally different [from the understanding of
the things]. Since the pratibhā is explained in terms of the meanings of words, they speak of it as a
‘sentence meaning’. (2.143) (…) The [pratibhā], without being considered, appears as if it brought about
the integration of [different] things. It occurs as an object (viṣaya – HD) since it appears as if it had all
forms [of the things]. (2.145)” (p. 3; italics indicate passages where Ogawa’s interpretation significantly
differs from earlier ones).
15
IYER (1969, p. 86-87): “When we have understood the meaning of the words of a sentence, a flash of
understanding of the meaning of the whole sentence takes place. It is quite different from the meanings
of the individual words” (identical statement p. 187). This is, of course, essentially a paraphrase of VP
2.143. Iyer’s expression “flash of understanding” to describe pratibhā, possibly borrowed from K.K.
RAJA (1963, p. 225), is taken up inter alia by AKAMATSU (1994), FERRANTE (2014) and, with consid-
erable emphasis, by TOLA & DRAGONETTI (1990, p. 110) and PRASAD (2010).
16
See also the first lines of VPSV 1.123 (= RAU 1.131), referring back to VPSV 1.14 and further clari-
fying the connection of pratibhā with kṣema (“satisfaction”, “happiness”) in the framework of
Bhart"hari’s doctrine of liberation through śabdapūrvayoga: śabdapūrvakaṃ yogam adhigamya prati-
bhāṃ (…) samyag avabudhya niyatā kṣemaprāptir iti (VPSV 1.123 [p. 202.1-3]).

7
artificial segmentation of language in verbal communication, so it also allows one ul-
timately to cancel differences between the objects of cognition, thus assuming a
properly soteriological function.17

This first, primarily linguistic interpretation of pratibhā generally goes together with
a non-literal reading of Bhart"hari’s statement identifying pratibhā with the object of
a sentence, quite evident in Iyer’s quote given above: it is – so it is argued – because
linguistic comprehension in the form of a “flash” is about the object of the sentence –
an action (kriyā) qualified by various factors (sādhana) – that pratibhā itself may, by
metonymy, be regarded as the object of a sentence (vākyārtha). Further implications
of this view, which remains essentially vague in Iyer’s wording, are drawn by OGAWA
(2012a). Refusing a literal identification of pratibhā with vākyārtha, Ogawa attributes
to Bhart"hari the idea that “the meaning of the sentence is drawn (upasaṃh+ta – HD)
into a pratibhā, which sets one into action for the achievement of one’s desired pur-
pose” (p. 10).18 This view is not exactly identical with Iyer’s, since Ogawa distin-
guishes from pratibhā the understanding of the sentence-object, subsequently “drawn
into” pratibhā, thereby giving rise to purposeful action. Linguistic comprehension thus
proceeds for him in two steps: the simple mental processing of the content conveyed
by the sentence (step 1), and pratibhā, which somehow incorporates it and orients the
subject towards a purposeful course of action (step 2). However, the main point holds,
namely that the object of the sentence is, for both Iyer and Ogawa, different from prat-
ibhā, which essentially remains an insight of the sentence-object.

As rightly pointed out by Ogawa (ibid. p. 10, n. 49), this non-literal reading of VP
2.143 can claim some support from the late grammatical tradition itself. Thus Nāgeśa
Bhaṭṭa (1670-1750?), who profusely quotes from the Vākyapadīya in the Laghu-
mañjuṣā, claims when it comes to pratibhā that “the object of a sentence is the content
of a mere insight” (vākyārthaḥ […] pratibhāmātraviṣayaḥ)19 so that, as he says again
in the same passage, “the way of speaking of pratibhā as the vākyārtha is due to the
fact that [the object of a sentence] is the content of that insight” (pratibhāviṣayatvāt
[…] pratibhā vākyārtha iti vyavahāraḥ).20 Whether Nāgeśa’s opinion can be taken as
that of late Pāṇinīyas in general is an open question. Yet it is clear from these state-
ments that, at least for him, literal interpretations of VP 2.143 such as Puṇyarāja’s
(pratibhā […] jāyate, tāṃ vākyārthaṃ vaiyākaraṇā āhuḥ - VP-Ṭīkā p. 65.19-20) do
not hold. For Nāgeśa, the specificity of pratibhā is in the modality under which the
object is apprehended, but that object remains essentially distinct from pratibhā.

17
FERRANTE (2014, p. 174): “Just as on a linguistic level the meaning of the sentence is grasped instan-
taneously with a flash of understanding (…), similarly the cognition of the ultimate reality, on a meta-
physical plane, is instantaneous and allows one to discard all unreal differentiations.”
18
This statement is essentially based on Ogawa’s interpretation (p. 7) of the expression pratibho-
pasaṃhāra in VPSV 1.24-26 (p. 67.4), which shall be discussed later on (Section 2).
19
Laghumañjuṣā p. 417.1.
20
Laghumañjuṣā p. 417.4-5.

8
A second line of interpretation considers that the concept of pratibhā does not only –
and perhaps not primarily – belong to linguistics, but rather to a general theory of
action, of which language-based action constitutes but a particular case. Thus, accord-
ing to AKLUJKAR (1970, p. 17), pratibhā is “a cognition that immediately precedes an
action (…), a cognition of the know-how type that paves the way to the desired action”.
That cognition, following Aklujkar, is “something innate to the sentient being and (…)
enjoys the same period of existence as any other cognition” ibid. p. 15). Following this
second interpretation, pratibhā would be a form of “practical” knowledge of an imme-
diate type, irreducible to any kind of theoretical knowledge – in Indian terms, “valid
knowledge” or knowledge based on the pramāṇas –, including verbal knowledge.21
Aklujkar thus proposes to take Bhart"hari’s statement in VP 2.143 literally, claiming
(against Nāgeśa) that “the sentence-meaning, according to Bhart"hari, is in the form of
an action-oriented cognition (pratibhā)” (ibid. p. 88). This, however, is difficult to
match with Aklujkar’s other statement that, according to Bhart"hari, “the meaning of
a sentence is the action as cognized from its verb (…) and as qualified by the meanings
of its other components (viśiṣṭā kriyā)” (ibid. p. 95). Is this action cognised from the
verb the same as the action towards which the agent’s cognition is oriented22? Or shall
we understand that the representation of an action is an integral part of the dynamic
motivational complex leading one to undertake an action? These questions, as far as I
can see, are not answered by Aklujkar, and I cannot but find some difficulty in his
conclusive statement that “Bhart"hari declares sentence-meaning to be pratibhā as well
as qualified action” (ibid. p. 16).

Of course, the conception of pratibhā as a form of cognition oriented towards action

is too conspicuous in Bhart"hari’s text (see below – Section 2) to have been missed
even by readers insisting on the primarily linguistic value of that concept.23 Still, little
effort has been made to reconcile these two aspects of Bhart"hari’s concept of prati-
bhā: how can one and the same cognition be said to be the cause of all human (and, to
some extent, non-human) activities and the object of all linguistic utterances? In other
words, is it possible to give a general epistemological account of pratibhā in
Bhart"hari’s thought, or are we rather dealing, as some scholars argued (TOLA &
DRAGONETTI 1990), with various irreconcilable “aspects” of a central, yet essentially
vague and equivocal concept?

It may be useful at this point to summarise the views examined so far, taking as a lead
the representational / non-representational nature of pratibhā when it follows a lin-
guistic utterance, as well as its identification / absence of identification with the object
of the sentence. Three views have been articulated:

21
On the impossibility of considering pratibhā a pramāṇa in Bhart"hari’s thought, see AKLUJKAR
(1989b: 155-156). See also RAJA (1963, p. 227): “A sentence produces an urge to do something rather
than creating an image of something in the mind”.
22
This, quite evidently, is the case in commands, advice, etc., but is it also the case elsewhere?
23
See for instance IYER (1969, p. 87-88), who insists on the fact that the concept of pratibhā in
Bhart"hari is “very comprehensive”.

9
 1. pratibhā is the immediate representation of the sentence-object; other, non-lin-
guistic usages of the concept are allowed by the fact that pratibhā is always
caused by speech or impulses of a linguistic nature (śabdabhāvanā) (K.A.S.
Iyer, possibly based on Nageśa Bhaṭṭa).
2. pratibhā is a representation produced by the representation of the sentence-ob-
ject, and the cause for undertaking an action; as such, it is not essentially dif-
ferent from non-linguistic pratibhā (H. Ogawa).
3. pratibhā is a non-representational form of practical knowledge, immediately
leading one to action, and that cognition is the only “object of the sentence”. It
is identical in nature with those cognitions giving rise to actions independently
of linguistic utterances (A. Aklujkar?).

In what follows, I shall try to make a decisive case for the last of these three views by
taking into account, besides Bhart"hari’s famous statements in the second kāṇḍa, all
other occurrences of this word in the first two kāṇḍas of the Vākyapadīya, as well as
six immediately post-Bhart"harian accounts of that concept (Dignāga, Kumārila, the
Yuktidīpikā, Maṇḍana Miśra, Kamalaśīla and Jayanta Bhaṭṭa). Even though none of
these early contributions belongs to the tradition of Vyākaraṇa, it is my contention that
they provide decisive elements for a precise understanding of Bhart"hari’s thought on
that topic. On this basis, I shall argue for a univocal conception of pratibhā in
Bhart"hari’s thought, as well as for a literal interpretation of his identification of prat-
ibhā as the object of all human utterances.

Section 2: a univocal concept of “insight” in the Vākyapadīya?

The word pratibhā does not occur very frequently in the Vākyapadīya; it appears only
once in the verses of the first kāṇḍa (VP 1.110c) as part of the compound pratibhātman,
and we find only seven further occurrences in the Svav+tti: VPSV 1.14 (p. 48.1 and p.
48.2), 1.24-26 (p. 67.4, within the compound pratibhopasaṃhāra, and p. 75.4), 1.114
(= RAU 1.130; p. 187.6), 1.123 (= RAU 1.144; p. 202.2) and 1.137 (= RAU 1.173; p.
226.4, again as part of the compound pratibhātman). It appears slightly more often
(four times) in the kārikās of the second kāṇḍa (VP 2.117a, 2.143b, 2.148d [in the
plural, pratibhāḥ] and 2.152d), generally in passages where the auto-commentary is
lost or missing, with the notable exception of VP 2.152; this probably explains why all
four occurrences of the word in the Svav+tti of the second kāṇḍa are in the portion
explaining that verse.24 In this section, I will take all these passages into consideration
in order to try to reconstruct, beyond the variety of its usages, a rigorous and univocal
comprehension of that concept in Bhart"hari’s magnum opus.

In order to safely find our way through Bhart"hari’s varied uses of an assuredly “very
comprehensive” concept (Iyer), we may take as a lead his enumeration of the six

24
The word pratibhā does not occur in the third kāṇḍa of the Vākyapadīya. Its usage by Helārāja, the
10th-century Kashmiri commentator, is also very limited, and need not concern us here.

10
“modes” (°vidhā) of insight in VP 2.152, which concludes his investigation of pratibhā
in VP 2.143-152, and in the work as a whole25:

They consider that insight (pratibhā) is six-fold: it is accounted for (upapādita) by (1)
nature (svabhāva), (2) [appropriate moral] conduct (caraṇa),26 (3) training (abhyāsa), (4)
[spiritual] discipline (yoga) (5) unseen [factors] (ad+ṣṭa), or else (6) it is placed upon
[somebody] by an extraordinary [person] (viśiṣṭopahitā).27

Modern readers of Bhart"hari often pointed out the striking contrast between the elab-
orate development on this verse in the Svav+tti and Puṇyarāja’s surprisingly laconic
treatment of it in the Ṭīkā,28 and rightly lamented the poor state of the transmission of
the auto-commentary in our only manuscript witness.29 However, medieval commen-
tators and modern exegetes of the Vākyapadīya rarely noticed how closely Bhart"hari

25
As appears clearly from the above list of occurrences, the topic of pratibhā is not discussed by
Bhart"hari after k. 2.152 of the VP. The topic of “insight”, quite pervasive in the beginning of the work,
does not seem to play any significant role after that point.
26
I am not convinced by Rau’s reading °varaṇa° (“choice”, “Wünschen” according to his translation of
the verse in RAU [2000, p. 76]) instead of °caraṇa°, found in all preceding editions of the text. Not only
does °varaṇa° contradict the Svav+tti on VP 2.152 (caraṇanimittā kā cit pratibhā – p. 222.5 [= M p.
90.7-8]), admittedly known to us through a single modern devanāgarī transcript; it also goes against
Śrīv"ṣabha’s recapitulation of this verse while commenting on VPSV 1.123 (svabhāvacaraṇābhyāsā-
dibhyo ’pi sā jāyate – Sphuṭākṣarā p. 202.12-13), as well as against the testimony of Bhart"hari himself
in VPSV 1.30, a passage to which, as we shall see, he implicitly refers back in VP(SV) 2.152 (see
below). On the same basis, I find Iyer’s emendation of caraṇa into ācaraṇa in VPSV 2.152 (p. 222.5)
not only unnecessary, but also quite implausible.
27
VP 2.152: svabhāvacaraṇābhyāsayogād+ṣṭopapāditām | viśiṣṭopahitāṃ ceti pratibhāṃ ṣaḍvidhāṃ
viduḥ || For reasons stated above (see preceding note), I do not accept Rau’s reading °varaṇa° in the
first pāda, and maintain the reading °caraṇa° from Iyer’s 1983 edition of the text.
28
See Puṇyarāja’s Ṭīkā on VP 2.152: svabhāvena yathā kapiḥ. caraṇādiṣūdāharaṇāny ūhyāni; “‘By
nature’, like a monkey; examples of the other cases, beginning with ‘[appropriate moral] conduct’ can
be guessed” (p. 68.4). The example of the monkey (kapi) is puzzling, although taken at face value by
Raghunātha Śarmā (Ambākartrī vol. 2 p. 228: yathā kapeḥ śākhāplavanādiṣu) and IYER (1969, p. 88 and
1977, p. 63). If Puṇyarāja wanted to illustrate animal instinctual behaviour, he could have chosen among
half a dozen examples given by Bhart"hari himself in the preceding kārikās (cuckoos, spiders, etc.);
why the monkey? I find it quite possible that the reading kapiḥ, found in all three editions of Puṇyarāja’s
Ṭīkā, is actually a misreading for kaviḥ (or kaveḥ) due to the common confusion between pa and va in
several Indian scripts (especially South Indian ones). If this were correct, Puṇyarāja would refer to the
insight of poets allowing literary creation, “natural” in the sense that it does not depend on education
(vyutpatti) but is entirely innate. See for instance Rājaśekhara’s Kāvyamīmāṃsā: pratibhāvyutpattimāṃś
ca kaviḥ kavir ity ucyate; “If a poet has both insight and education, he is [really] a poet” (p. 17.5). Among
early Ālaṃkārikas, Bhāmaha (Kāvyālaṃkāra 1.5) already speaks of kāvya as belonging “to him who
has insight” (pratibhāvataḥ) and similarly Daṇḍin (Kāvyādarśa 1.103) of “insight, which is innate”
(naisargikī pratibhā) as “the cause of success in poetry” (kāraṇaṃ kāvyasaṃpadaḥ). Other references
in GONDA (1963, p. 323-334), also PRASAD (2010). It is quite possible that Puṇyarāja, not taking into
account (or not understanding) Bhart"hari’s rather obscure explanation of svabhāva in the Svav+tti,
would be referring here to the old idea of pratibhā as the innate source of poetic creation.
29
See IYER (1969, p. 88 and 1977, p. 63). As noted above, k. 2.152 is the first kārikā to be transmitted
along with the Svav+tti after a long interruption, spanning over nearly a hundred kārikās; it is likely that
the first folio after the gap suffered extensive damage in the original Malayalam palm-leaf manuscript,

11
is following here his own elaborations in the first kāṇḍa. As a matter of fact, nearly all
“factors” meant to causally explain (upa-√padcaus) the birth of pratibhā are discussed,
in the same order (but in a less systematic way), in this or that passage of VP(SV) 1.14-
37.30 A closer look at cases enumerated in k. 2.152 in the light of these parallels might
help us get closer to Bhart"hari’s understanding of pratibhā, and of the relevance of
that concept for linguistic philosophy.

2.1 “Natural” insight: a pure propensity for being

Among the six varieties of pratibhā enumerated by Bhart"hari (1-6), the most difficult
to grasp is certainly the first (1), insight by “nature” (svabhāva), probably because it
is the one situated beyond the domain of individual cognitive experience. Unfortu-
nately, the description of this first modality of pratibhā in the Svav+tti on VP 2.152 is
too lacunary, and our understanding of it still too incomplete, to attempt a translation.31
But a comparison with the v+tti on VP 1.14 (to a lesser extent, with that on VP 1.123
[= RAU 1.144], which recapitulates some of its main points) yields some striking par-
allels, which might help us achieve some progress.

The main character of pratibhā as it is theorised in the two passages is that of a “pro-
pensity”, an “inclination” (āṇuguṇya), something “conducive to” a certain develop-
ment. According to Bhart"hari’s description in VPSV 2.152, it is “comparable to a
sleeper’s propensity for awakening” (suṣuptāvasthasyeva prabodhānuguṇyam – p.
222.4).32 But then, propensity for what, and belonging to whom? The first point,

from which our only surviving testimony for the first half of the second kāṇḍa (M) was copied. This
could perhaps explain the fragmentary state of the v+tti on this verse.
30
A notable exception is Raghunātha Śarmā, who seems to presuppose at least some of these parallels
in his explanation of the v+tti on this verse in the second volume of the Ambākartrī (p. 228-229). See
also IYER (1969, p. 88-89), who sketches a few promising comparisons between the two kāṇḍas.
31
The text as it is transmitted in M reads as follows: kā cit svābhāvikī pratibhā, tad yathā parasyāḥ
<+++++++>thamaṃ sattālakṣaṇam ātmānaṃ mahāntaṃ praty ānuguṇyaṃ, suṣuptāvasthasyeva pra-
bodhānuguṇyaṃ phalasattāmātraṃ nidrāyāḥ (M p. 90, l. 4-7 – each sign ‘+’ stands for the space of one
akṣara). The conjecture parasyāḥ <prak+teḥ pra>thamaṃ filling the initial lacuna was apparently pro-
posed for the first time in 1968 by Raghunātha Śarmā, as it is not found in Cārudeva Śāstrī’s first edition
of the text of the Svav+tti (Ed1939/40); it is taken up by all subsequent editors of the text.
32
In the electronic draft of his edition of the Svav+tti (AD), A. Aklujkar proposes to conjecture suṣuptā-
vasthasya vā instead of suṣuptāvasthasyeva, the reading found in M and all printed editions. This con-
jecture would make awakening a second example for svabhāva, instead of a comparison as suggested
by iva. I find it unlikely, however, that Bhart"hari attributes our ordinary capacity to wake up from sleep
to an “insight”, especially one of the first kind (at least, he never says such a thing). Besides, the suc-
cession of sleep and awakening (svapnaprabodhav+tti) already appears, in the Svav+tti on VP 1.110 (=
RAU 1.122; p. 181.3-4) and VP 1.137 (= RAU 1.173; p. 226.3-5), as a metaphor for stages in the mani-
festation of the universe by “the great cause, the substance of speech” (mahati […] vāktatattve kāraṇe
– p. 181.4) / the “sempiternal cause” (nityaṃ kāraṇam – p. 226.3-4). Incidentally or not, these are pre-
cisely the two passages in the latter half of the first kāṇḍa where this kind of trans-individual, “meta-
physical” pratibhā is discussed, in the form of pratibhātman (VP 1.110c and VPSV 1.137, p. 226.5).
Sure enough, neither of the two texts connects the image of awakening with pratibhā directly; nor is
pratibhā explicitly identified there as the supreme cause. Still, all these passages are closely related, and

12
namely the nature of the development resulting from pratibhā, remains unclear. Fol-
lowing the explanation given by Bhart"hari in the first kāṇḍa, pratibhā is “a simple
inclination towards being” (sattānuguṇyamātra – p. 48.2). This appears coherent with
his characterisation of pratibhā in the second kāṇḍa as sattālakṣaṇam ātmānaṃ
mahāntaṃ praty ānuguṇyaṃ (p. 222.4) – an expression for which I cannot honestly
propose a convincing translation – in the sense that sattā appears as the object of the
inclination defining pratibhā. But what exactly is meant here by sattā? According to
Śrīv"ṣabha, commenting on the expression sattānuguṇyamātra in VPSV 1.14, “with
[the word] sattā [Bhart"hari] indicates all modifications of existence (bhāvavikāra)”33;
this, however, hardly matches Bhart"hari’s affirmation in the second kāṇḍa, for how
could these modifications be equated with the entity referred to as mahat and ātman?
It is also unclear whether, in that same passage, mahat actually refers to the third “es-
sence” (tattva) of Sāṃkhya – Raghunātha Śarmā’s hypothesis,34 adopted by IYER
(1969, p. 88 and 1977, p. 63) and never challenged after him – or just means “great”,
as for instance in Bhart"hari’s description of the “great Bull of speech” (mahān
śabdav+ṣabhaḥ), in reference to a famous Vedic verse (Ṛksaṃhitā 4.58.3), in VPSV
1.122 (= RAU 1.143; p. 201.2). In the same passage of the first kāṇḍa, Bhart"hari also
writes of the “Person whose Self (ātman) is speech” (puruṣa[ḥ] vāgātm[ā] – p. 200.2-
3), thus providing another plausible explanation for the juxtaposition of mahat and
ātman in our text. The interpretation of mahat as mahattattva is also difficult to recon-
cile with perhaps the most obvious parallel for Bhart"hari’s description in the second
kāṇḍa, namely the Svav+tti on VP 1.137 (= RAU 1.173), where the Ṛṣis who “dwell at
the heart of pratibhā” (pratibhātmani vivartante – p. 226.4) are said to “see the Great
Self, consisting of being, the origin of nescience” (sattālakṣaṇaṃ mahāntam ātmānam
avidyāyoniṃ paśyantaḥ - p. 226.5). Needless to say, neither Raghunātha Śarmā in his
commentary on this line (Ambākartrī vol. 1, p. 227) nor translations of the same by

together suggest that sleep and awakening are generally used as a metaphor by Bhart"hari, and that they
also play this role in our passage of the second kāṇḍa.
33
Sphuṭākṣarā p. 48.17: sattayā sarvabhāvavikārạm lakṣayati. Śrīv"ṣabha’s expression bhāvavikāra re-
fers, of course, to the six modifications of being – birth, existence, change, growth, etc. – in Yāska’s
Nirukta (1.2), alluded to in VP 1.3cd (janmādayo vikārāḥ ṣaḍ bhāvabhedasya yonayaḥ). See BIARDEAU
(1964a, p. 30, n. 1). The reason for Śrīv"ṣabha’s equation of sattā with bhāvavikāra is almost certainly
Bhart"hari’s statement in VPSV 1.123 defining pratibhā as “existence, the origin of the modifications
of being” (pratibhāṃ (…) bhāvavikāraprak+tiṃ sattām – p. 202.2). I cannot see any easy solution to the
apparent contradiction in Bhart"hari’s statements qualifying pratibhā as sattānuguṇya in VPSV 1.14,
and as sattā in VPSV 1.123 or sattālakṣaṇa in VPSV 1.137.
34
See p. 228 in the Ambākartrī, where the expression mahāntam ātmānam praty ānuguṇyam is glossed
in Sāṃkhya terms as sattāmātrasvarūpam ātmānaṃ buddhim mahāntaṃ mahattattvaṃ praty ānu-
guṇyam; “The propensity [of the Supreme Prak"ti to evolve] into mahat, i.e. the essence (tattva) ma-
hat, which is none other than the Self, i.e. the intellect (buddhi), consisting only of sattā [i.e. satt-
vaguṇa – HD].” Unfortunately, Raghunātha Śarmā does not discuss further his interpretation of sattā as
the first of Sāṃkhya’s three qualities (guṇa), and how it might match Bhart"hari’s interpretation of
pratibhā as sattānuguṇyamātra in VPSV 1.14, a passage he obviously had in mind for this must be the
source of his idea that VPSV 2.152 refers to “the Great Prak"ti” (mahāprak+tiḥ). R. Śarmā’s brief gloss
of Bhart"hari’s expression sattānuguṇyamātrāt in VPSV 1.14 by sattayopalakṣitā in the first volume of
the Ambākartrī (p. 37) is too vague to determine whether he refers there also to the first of Sāṃkhya’s
three guṇas (sattva, rajas and tamas).

13
BIARDEAU (1964a, p. 185) or IYER (1965, p. 131) see any reference to the Sāṃkhya
notion of mahat in that portion of the V+tti of the first kāṇḍa, which corresponds almost
word for word to Bhart"hari’s description of pratibhā in the second.

We are hopefully less in the dark regarding our second question, namely that of whose
propensity this first mode of pratibhā is. According to Raghunātha Śarmā’s emenda-
tion of the lacunary version of VPSV 2.152 in M and the Lahore edition (see above, n.
31), later adopted by Iyer (Ed1983 p. 222.3-4) and Aklujkar (AD), we would be dealing
here with “the first inclination of the Supreme Prak"ti” (parasyāḥ prak+teḥ prathamam
(…) ānuguṇyam – Ed1968 p. 228.7-8). This reference to the Sāṃkhya-inspired concept
of Supreme Prak"ti (parā prak+tiḥ) is more likely than in the case of mahat, and is
probably based on its first appearance in VPSV 1.14 (p. 48.3). There, Bhart"hari care-
fully distinguishes between “the origin (prak+ti) of speech modifications” (vāg-
vikārāṇāṃ prak+tiḥ - p. 48.1), an expression he uses to qualify pratibhā, and “Supreme
Prak"ti” (parā prak+tiḥ - p. 48.3), placed by him in an even more eminent metaphysical
position since, at that level, all modifications of speech have disappeared, while in
pratibhā they are still present in nuce. That difference is also what allows Śrīv"ṣabha
to equate pratibhā with paśyantī, the highest level of speech in Bhart"hari’s threefold
scheme.35 It seems therefore coherent to suppose that the “inclination towards being”
(sattānuguṇya) defining pratibhā belongs to that Supreme Prak"ti, also consisting of
speech and a synonym of Śabdatattva.36

To summarise, the first variety of pratibhā, existing “by nature”, is a higher, undiffer-
entiated form of speech belonging to the Supreme Prak"ti (parā prak+tiḥ). It essentially
consists of a cognition (buddhi) which is nothing but a mere propensity (ānuguṇya) for
differentiation. Like paśyantī, to which (following Śrīv"ṣabha’s hint) it may be identi-
fied, pratibhā can only be reached by undertaking a path of purification, well described
in the Svav+tti on VP 1.123 (= RAU 1.144). It starts with a process of separation of
what is “correct” (sādhu) and what is “corrupt” (asādhu or apabhraṃśa) in our lin-
guistic usages by which, as Bhart"hari says, “the substance of speech is brought to its

35
See Sphuṭākṣarā p. 48.15: pratibhām iti. yeyaṃ samastaśabdārthakāraṇabhūtā buddhiḥ, yāṃ
paśyantīty āhuḥ; “‘[he reaches] insight’, i.e. that cognition (buddhi) which is the cause of all speech-
elements and their referents, [and] that they call paśyantī (‘the Seer’)”. Although Bhart"hari never for-
mally equates paśyantī with pratibhā, the latter’s power of differentiation brings it close to descriptions
of paśyantī in VPSV 1.134 (= RAU 1.159): pratisaṃh+takramā saty apy abhede samāviṣṭakramaśaktiḥ
paśyantī; “paśyantī has its sequence entirely withdrawn and, even though it is undifferentiated, it is
possessed with a power [to produce] sequence” (p. 214.4). Bhart"hari’s claim that paśyantī, which stands
“beyond the realm of worldly experience” (lokavyavahārātīta – p. 216.2), can be reached by a process
of purification defined as the discrimination of what is correct and what is corrupt in speech, as well as
by śabdapūrvayoga, is also entirely coherent with Bhart"hari’s claim in the Svav+tti on VP 1.123 that
the experience of pratibhā depends on “the removal of any polluting contact with corrupt forms” (apa-
bhraṃśopaghātāpagam[aḥ] – p. 201.8-202.1) and on śabdapūrvayoga (p. 202.1). So, despite the objec-
tions voiced against it by BIARDEAU (1964b, p. 322), I do not see any good reason to reject Śrīv"ṣabha’s
tentative identification of “natural” pratibhā with the highest level of speech.
36
See, for instance, the last pāda of the untraced verse quoted by Bhart"hari in the Svav+tti on VP 1.118
(= RAU 1.134): vāg eva prak+tiḥ parā; “The Supreme Prak"ti is Vāc alone” (p. 194.2).

14
perfection” (saṃskriyamāṇe śabdatattve – p. 201.8). That process, whose immediate
result is the production of a “specific merit” (dharmaviśeṣa – p. 202.1), can be further
integrated by training (abhyāsa) – in that case presumably a form of conscious reflec-
tion on one’s own practice of purification through grammatical analysis –, culminating
in the “union preceded by speech” (śabdapūrvaka[ḥ] yoga[ḥ]),37 directly responsible
for the comprehension (ava-√budh) of pratibhā. This finally leads one to “satisfac-
tion” (kṣema), another word for liberation, the “realisation of the Supreme Self” (sid-
dhiḥ paramātmanaḥ - VP 1.123b).38 Most crucial for our purpose is that this first mode
of pratibhā, pratibhā by “nature” or pratibhā in its purest form, already appears as a
border-concept, where unity and dynamism are like the two sides of the same coin.
Unmarked by differentiation and therefore akin to Supreme Prak"ti, pratibhā is like
the first desire of that Prak"ti, a mere productive tendency inherent in the highest form
of speech and reality. Let us keep in mind these two characteristics – non-differentia-
tion in terms of form or content and productivity –, which will remain a hallmark of
pratibhā in all its forms.

2.2 Individual forms of insight: immediate cognition informed by āgama

Fortunately, we do not face the same challenges in the interpretation of other forms of
pratibhā, manifesting at an individual level (2-6). If we leave out the last one (6), which
has no direct equivalent in the first kāṇḍa, all remaining factors enumerated in VP
2.152 – caraṇa, abhyāsa, ad+ṣṭa, yoga (2-5) – have been dealt with by Bhart"hari to
various extents in VP(SV) 1.30, 1.35, 1.36 and 1.37-38 respectively, although pratibhā
is never named there.39 This does not happen by chance: all types of pratibhā resulting
from these causes are forms of cognition, or practical abilities, which individuals can-
not achieve by their own effort or intellectual power; they are conferred onto them by
an external cause, which can be of various types. Thus it is only natural that these
modes of pratibhā should be discussed in the section of VP 1 elaborating on the cardi-
nal opposition of tarka, “reasoning, ratiocination” and āgama, “transmission, inherited
cognition” (VP[SV] 1.30-43).40 In fact, as Bhart"hari says in a programmatic state-
ment, all causes of pratibhā are nothing but particular modes of āgama:

Every insight (pratibhā), although it can be of many kinds, depends on a transmission in

the form of sentences (āgamikavākyanibandhanā), [thus] it is conveyed by the sentence
(vākyapratipādyā).41

37
It is beyond my intention here to solve the enigma of the expression śabdapūrvayoga, on which al-
ready much ink has been spilt. For a summary of existing positions, see FERRANTE (2014, p. 166-174).
38
See VP 1.123 [= RAU 1.144] and the Svav+tti (p. 201.6-202.3). Translations: BIARDEAU (1964a, p.
167-169), IYER (1965, p. 118-119). On this process, see also IYER (1964).
39
More precisely, in many respects VP(SV) 2.152 appears as the putting together, under the aegis of
pratibhā, of several cases dealt with in the first kāṇḍa, with sometimes significantly distinct nuances.
This might explain the rather disparate and heterogeneous nature of the list of “causes” (nimitta) of
pratibhā given by Bhart"hari in the second kāṇḍa.
40
On Bhart"hari’s concept of āgama, see AKLUJKAR (1989a, p. 17-18).
41
Svav+tti on VP 2.152: evaṃ pratibhā bahuvidhāpi sarvaivāgamikavākyanibandhanā vākyapratipādyā
(p. 222.10-11). I translate the text with Cārudeva Śāstrī’s emendation of the reading evaṃ pratibhā

15
The idea that pratibhā, in whatever form, is “conveyed by the sentence” (vakya-
pratipādya) is very close indeed to Bhart"hari’s controversial claim in VP 2.143
(quoted above – Section 1) according to which pratibhā is “the object of the sentence”
(vākyārtha), and it is just as unsettling. In order to fully make sense of it we need to
establish, first of all, how each of the five modalities of “individual” pratibhā relates
to “transmission” (āgama). Here is how Bhart"hari describes these five modalities in
the Svav+tti on VP 2.152:

Sometimes, insight may be caused by [appropriate moral] conduct (caraṇa) (2), like that
of Vasiṣṭha, etc. in whom a special light has settled (avadh+taprakāśaviśeṣa)42 as a result
of his conduct (caraṇena).43 Sometimes it is caused by training (abhyāsa) (3), like that
of experts in currencies (rūpatarka), etc.44 Sometimes it is caused by [spiritual] disci-
pline (yoga) (4), like that [responsible for] the yogins’ unfailing knowledge of other peo-
ple’s thoughts and similar things. [Insight] can also be caused by an unseen factor
(ad+ṣṭa) (5), like that [allowing] demons, ancestors and goblins to take possession of
other people’s bodies, to become invisible, etc. Sometimes, it is placed upon [somebody]
by an extraordinary [person] (viśiṣṭair upahitā) (6), for instance Sañjaya’s,45 [placed
upon him] by K"ṣṇa Dvaipāyana.46

bahu(.) pratibhāpi found in M (p. 90.14-15) into evaṃ pratibhā bahuvidhāpi (Ed1939/40 p. 83.1), adopted
by all subsequent editors. The same idea is found in VP 2.151, in the particular context of Bhart"hari’s
explanation of instinctual behaviour in animals (VP 2.149-150): bhāvanānugatād etad āgamād eva
jāyate | āsattiviprakarṣābhyām āgamas tu viśiṣyate ||; “This all [happens] because of transmission, fol-
lowed by traces; but transmission can be of different kinds: either close or far away.”
42
On the interpretation of this compound, cf. VP 1.37a, where a similar compound āvirbhūtaprakāśa
(“in whom a particular light has shown”) is used to qualify the “learned ones” (śiṣṭa).
43
The reading caraṇena is Raghunātha Śarma’s emendation of an original reading kāraṇena, found in
M (p. 90.8) and the Lahore edition (Ed1939/40 p. 82.20-21). The reading of the manuscript does not seem
to fit the context, but caraṇena also appears somewhat redundant in the sentence, so it is still tentative.
Other emendations were attempted by Iyer (ācaraṇena – Ed1983 p. 222.5-6) and Aklujkar (antaḥ-
karaṇena [AD]), none of which appears particularly convincing.
44
Aklujkar’s emendation (AD) of the aberrant reading kūpataṭākādīnām (“of wells, ponds, etc.”?), found
in M (p. 90.10), into rūpatarkādīnām (“of experts in currencies, etc.”) appears necessary, and must be
based on a comparison with VPSV 1.35 (p. 93.3: na hi rūpatarkādayaḥ sūkṣmān aprasiddhavijñāna-
padān…), where a similar observation is made by Bhart"hari. Other attempts to “freely” correct the text
like Raghunātha Śarmā’s kūpataṭākakhanakādīnām (“of diggers of wells, ponds, etc.” – Ed1968 p. 229.1),
adopted by Iyer (Ed1983 p. 222.7; see also IYER [1969, p. 89] and IYER [1977, p. 63]), are much less
convincing, since the example of well-diggers does not come up anywhere else in the VP.
45
Bhart"hari is alluding here to the extraordinary vision of Sañjaya, Dh"tarāṣṭra’s charioteer in the
Mahābhārata, allowing him to witness the great war of the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. According to
the epic narrative, this capacity was, indeed, granted to him by K"ṣṇa Dvaipāyana.
46
caraṇanimittā kā cit pratibhā, tad yathā caraṇenaivāvadh+taprakāśaviśeṣāṇāṃ vasiṣṭhādīnām. ab-
hyāsanimittā kā cit, tad yathā rūpatarkādīnām. yoganimittā kā cit, tad yathā yoginām avyabhicāreṇa
parābhiprāyajñānādiṣu. tathā kā cid ad+ṣṭanimittā, tad yathā rakṣaḥpit+piśācādīnāṃ parāveśāntar-
dhānādiṣu. kā cid viśiṣṭair upahitā, tad yathā sañjayādīnāṃ k+ṣṇadvaipāyanādibhiḥ (M p. 90.7-14).
Modifications of the text of the manuscript are underlined; variant readings found in printed editions
and tentative conjectures are too many to be all reported here. Sources for our three emendations are as
follows: caraṇena conj (Raghunātha Śarmā): kāraṇena M; vasiṣṭhādīnām conj (Cārudeva Śāstrī):
vasi… M; rūpatarkādīnām conj (Aklujkar): kūpataṭākādīnām M.

16
Leaving aside training (abhyāsa) (3), to which I shall return, the four remaining causes
(2, 4, 5, 6) are factors responsible for extraordinary cognitions (or supernatural abili-
ties) in selected individuals, human or superhuman. The first, caraṇa (“[appropriate
moral] conduct”), has sometimes been interpreted in the sense of the “(adherence to a)
Vedic school”, and it is true that the meaning of “Vedic school” is widely attested for
caraṇa in the Svav+tti (on VP 1.5, 1.31, 1.39, 1.43, etc.).47 This, however, does not hold
if we compare our passage with VPSV 1.30, where the word caraṇa is used, in a dif-
ferent sense, in the middle of a compound p+thagvidyācaraṇaparigraha (p. 86.3),
meaning in the context “[persons] who are in possession of extraordinary knowledge
(vidyā) and [moral] conduct (caraṇa).”48 According to Śrīv"ṣabha, Bhart"hari is talking
here of sages such as Kapila, the founder of the Sāṃkhya system (kapilādayaḥ -
Sphuṭākṣarā p. 86.25), which makes the case similar to that of Vasiṣṭha in the passage
I just quoted from the Svav+tti on k. 2.152. The example of Vasiṣṭha appears, in fact,
quite appropriate to exemplify the knowledge of dharma by Vedic Ṛṣis (ārṣaṃ (…)
jñānam), which is the topic of VP(SV) 1.30. This “insightful knowledge” (“connais-
sance clairvoyante” – BIARDEAU [1964a, p. 75]) is to be carefully distinguished from
the knowledge of the “learned ones” (śiṣṭa), described in VP(SV) 1.37-38, which
shares many similarities with forms of cognition normally attributed to yogins in
roughly contemporary philosophical sources: perception of very subtle or remote
things, direct apprehension of past and future, etc.49 This naturally leads one to think
that the case of the śiṣṭas in the first kāṇḍa and that of the yogins in the second are
comparable.50 The case of Sañjaya is akin to that of yogins, except that his knowledge
is the result of a gift, not of personal discipline, and as we said it is not dealt with by

47
See IYER (1969, p. 88) and IYER (1977, p. 63), where caraṇa is translated as the “adherence to one’s
own Veda”. Raghunātha Śarmā, in the Ambākartrī (vol. 2, p. 229), glosses caraṇa as sadācāra (“good
conduct”) or śāstravihitaṃ tapaḥsvādhyāyādikaṃ (“austerities, recitation for oneself, etc. as they are
prescribed in the Veda”), and it is not impossible that Iyer tried to match the second meaning by giving
caraṇa its meaning of “Vedic school”. Yet it is clear that, in all other occurrences of the word caraṇa
in Bhart"hari’s work, what prevails is not the idea of the adherence to one’s Veda, but rather the diversity
of traditions within a single, unbroken Vedic tradition, which makes Iyer’s interpretation rather forced.
48
BIARDEAU (1964a, p. 75): “qui supposent un savoir et une conduite extraordinaires”; IYER (1965, p.
43): “who have adopted a particular mode of intellectual and spiritual life”. Śrīv"ṣabha, commenting on
the word caraṇa, first glosses it as caryā (“conduct”), then proposes two possible interpretations of
caryā as ācāra (“moral conduct”) or as siddhānta (“thought conduct”, hence “view”). See Sphuṭākṣarā
p. 86.27-87.7. Needless to say, he is also perfectly aware of the other meaning of caraṇa, which he
glosses with sāmādi (“The Sāma[veda], etc.”) in his commentary on VPSV 1.5 (p. 26.17).
49
See, for instance Yogasūtra 3.16 (atītānāgatajñāna) and 3.24 (sūkṣmavyavahitaviprak+ṣṭajñāna) and
Praśastapādabhāṣya p. 45.5-9 (on yogipratyakṣa). Note that the perception of past and future is not
included by Praśastapāda among objects of perception of yogins, but among those of a separate category
he calls – in words very close indeed to Bhart"hari’s – “the knowledge of the Ṛṣis” (+ṣīṇāṃ […] jñānam)
(p. 57.9-15), also qualified as prātibha (“intuitive”). In spite of this difference, the broad distinction
between the knowledge of Ṛṣis, which is mainly about dharma, and the perception of yogins, less di-
rectly relevant for religious duty (if by no means less extraordinary), is similar in both sources. On
pratibhā/prātibha in the Yoga and Vaiśeṣika contexts, see KAVIRAJ (1923/24) and ISAACSON (1993);
for a comparison with Bhart"hari, see FERRANTE (2016, p. 51-55).
50
A similar conclusion is reached by TORELLA (2012, p. 472, n. 9) and FERRANTE (2016, p. 55).

17
Bhart"hari anywhere in the first kāṇḍa. The remaining category, that of supernatural
powers (siddhi – VP 1.36d) of “ancestors, demons and goblins” (pit+rakṣaḥpiśācānām
[VP 1.36c]; rakṣaḥpit+piśācādīnāṃ [VPSV 2.152; p. 222.8-9]), is discussed in VP 1.36
in exactly the same terms as in the second kāṇḍa. It essentially proves that certain
capacities (possession of other people’s body, invisibility, etc.) are due to an “unseen
factor” (ad+ṣṭa) / an “act [bearing its fruit]” (karman – VP 1.36d), and cannot be ac-
counted for by natural causes (sādhana).51 This is probably what allows Bhart"hari to
include such abilities of demons, etc. as varieties of pratibhā, even though they do not
have any evident cognitive counterpart.

What is immediately striking in all these passages is the great proximity between trans-
mission (āgama) and perception (pratyakṣa). Nothing appears, indeed, further away
from Bhart"hari’s thought than the classic, Mīmāṃsā-inspired, opposition between
Scripture and “other” sources of knowledge (perception, inference, etc.): sure enough,
traditions (especially scriptural ones) also deal with objects that are beyond the senses
(atīndriya – VP 1.38a), but we trust them for we believe they are the words of those
who have seen them52; conversely, no one can safely go beyond the realm of the senses
unless properly guided by āgama.53 The real dividing line, then, rather passes between
inference / reasoning (anumāna, tarka) on the one hand, the domain of those “whose
mind is distracted by generic forms” (rūpasāmānyād apah+tabuddhiḥ - VPSV 1.32 [p.
89.2-3]), and perception and language on the other, capable of grasping singularity
embedded in an infinitely complex web of particular situations. In this framework, the
main function of Scripture is to create conditions for the emergence of “another per-
ception, distinct from ordinary perception” (prasiddhapratyakṣavyatireke pratyakṣān-
taram – Sphuṭākṣarā on VP 1.37a [p. 94.17]), yet “not [essentially] different from per-
ception” (pratyakṣān na viśiṣyate – VP 1.37d). Its role, in other words, is not to teach
us what we cannot see, but to allow us to apprehend by our own faculties what we
would otherwise be unable to grasp.

This dialectic, by which perception becomes enabled to operate “on the backdrop of
āgama” (AKLUJKAR [1989b, p. 151]), can clearly be seen at work in the last modality
of pratibhā, insight born from training (abhyāsa) (3), which is the only one concerned
with ordinary, “worldly” perceptions; it is also more strictly Bhart"harian, and will
easily take us back to language philosophy. Two examples are taken into account in
VP(SV) 1.35: currency-experts (rūpatarka) and music connoisseurs (abhiyukta), the

51
See VPSV 1.36: (…) ad+ṣṭaśaktim acintyāṃ hitvā nānyāni sādhanāny ākhyātuṃ śakyante; “(…) ex-
cept for the unthinkable power of the unseen factor, one cannot state any further cause” (p. 94.3-4).
52
See VP 1.37cd: atītānāgatajñānaṃ pratyakṣān na viśiṣyate; “[their] cognition of the past and the fu-
ture does not differ from a perception”; VPSV 1.37: (…) śiṣṭāḥ pratibimbakalpena pratyakṣam iva svāsu
khyātiṣu saṃkrāntākāraparigraham avyabhicaritaṃ sarvaṃ paśyanti; “(…) the learned ones see every-
thing (sarvaṃ paśyanti) without fail as if it were directly perceived, its shape being transferred to their
cognition like a reflection [in a mirror]” (p. 95.2-3).
53
See VP 1.30: +ṣīṇām api yaj jñānaṃ tad apy āgamapūrvakam ||; “Even the knowledge of the Ṛṣis is
preceded by [scriptural] transmission.”

18
first taken up in the second kāṇḍa as well (see above and n. 44); Bhart"hari’s explana-
tion in VP 1 is more detailed, and deserves to be quoted at length:

[VP 1.35:] Knowledge of gems, currencies and so forth, which cannot be explained to
others, is born from training (abhyāsa) alone in people who are experts in those things; it
does not depend on inferences. [SV:] Experts in currencies are unable to explain to others
the causes of their understanding of a kārṣāpaṇa [= a unit of currency], for instance; [these
causes] are subtle, and cannot be called by any familiar name, even by making use of
mental constructions. Similarly, without training, connoisseurs (abhiyukta) would not be
able to apprehend the difference between [the musical notes] ṣaḍja, +ṣabha, gāndhāra,
dhaivata, etc., even though [these notes] are objects of perceptual knowledge, [and] even
by applying much attention (praṇidhāna) to that effect.54

Quite essential here is the opposition of “attention” (praṇidhāna), which one deliber-
ately applies to certain sets of objects, and “training” (abhyāsa), which automatically
reveals those objects by giving the perceiver a “preparation” (*saṃskāra) he could not
achieve otherwise: “skill” or “culture”, as we would call it. Although Bhart"hari does
not speak of saṃskāra in this particular passage, the notion is met with in VPSV 1.30,
where Ṛṣis are said to be “well-prepared [for knowing dharma] by meritorious acts
pertaining to [traditional] transmission” ([+ṣīṇām] āgamikenaiva dharmeṇa saṃsk+tāt-
manām – p. 86.4-87.1), and its relevance in our context is confirmed by paraphrases
of Bhart"hari’s “musical” example in later philosophical literature.55 The correlate of
such a “perfection” of our apprehensive faculties through training is a parallel process
of particularisation of their objects, by which one becomes capable of grasping an
increasing number of ever subtler differences (viśeṣa) in those objects. General
knowledge about coins or purely theoretical training in music are of no use unless our
perceptive faculties are sharpened, so to say, by putting them into practice in a number
of particular cases, and such is the function of abhyāsa.

Although “training” (abhyāsa), understood as the deepening of our cognitive experi-

ence by the fixation of certain events through continuous repetition,56 does not neces-
sarily imply that this cognition is of a linguistic nature, that aspect is nevertheless
stressed in Bhart"hari’s interpretation of his two examples: the expert in currencies

54
[VP:] pareṣām asamākhyeyam abhyāsād eva jāyate | maṇirūpyādivijñānaṃ tadvidāṃ nānumānikam ||
[SV:] na hi rūpatarkādayaḥ sūkṣmān aprasiddhasaṃvijñānapadān kārṣāpaṇādīnāṃ kalpayitvāpi sa-
madhigamahetūn parebhya ākhyātuṃ śaknuvanti. ṣaḍja+ṣabhagāndhāradhaivatādibhedaṃ vā praty-
akṣapramāṇaviṣayam apy abhyāsam antareṇābhiyuktāḥ praṇidhānavanto ’pi na pratipadyante (p. 93.1-
6 – reading and numeration of the verse are identical in RAU [1977]). The second example, that of
musical notes, is taken up again in VP 1.111 [= RAU 1.123]) and the Svav+tti. On these passages, see
also OGAWA (2009: 417-421).
55
See, for instance, the very “Bhart"harian” passage from Vācaspati’s Bhāmatī (1.1.1) quoted in DAVID
(2020, p. 59-60), where the 10th-century Vedāntic philosopher speaks, in the case of musical expertise,
of a “perfection granted by one’s training in the knowledge of the object of musical treatises” (gāndhar-
vaśāstrārthajñānābhyāsāhitasaṃskāra).
56
See Sphuṭākṣarā on VPSV 1.1: abhyāsaḥ punaḥ punar utpattiḥ; “training is the repeated arising [of a
cognition] (p. 5.7); on VPSV 1.14: āv+ttir abhyāsaḥ; “training amounts to repetition” (p. 48.19).

19
and the music aficionado. For both are cases where “a familiar (and well-established)
designation does not exist” (aprasiddhasaṃvijñānapada [p. 93.3] / anavasthitāprasid-
dhasaṃvijñānapada [p. 182.5]) while, as he claims in the auto-commentary on VP
1.111 (= RAU 1.123), “it is only on the basis of a designation (saṃvijñānapada) that an
object becomes an integral part of our experience”.57 Names of rare coins and musical
terminology, though an integral part of a language, are not included in the common
repertoire of a competent speaker of that language (in fact, many good speakers of
Sanskrit would not know, or at least would have no precise idea of what a kārṣāpaṇa
is). And since they do not have a word to name them, they are also unable to concep-
tually or perceptually distinguish between those entities, and efficiently act upon them.
This, of course, is not to say that names of currencies or musical notes are created by
experts; like any other word, their names (kārṣāpaṇa, ṣaḍja, +ṣabha, etc.) are sanc-
tioned by the community, and pre-exist their use by specialists. But unlike for familiar
words like ghaṭa (‘pot’), for instance, the entities they designate cannot be grasped at
once. The process by which a person becomes able to distinguish these entities is there-
fore exactly contemporaneous with that by which he learns the appropriate use of such
designations.58

We are now able to propose a first generic characterisation of pratibhā in the VP as

immediate cognition informed by verbal transmission.59 That cognition shares the di-
rectness of perception, but it is conditioned by language in the form either of explicit
sentences or of latent traces (bhāvanā). Not only does speech give form to the content
of that cognition – this is true of virtually every cognition for Bhart"hari –; its very
existence is allowed by the cogniser’s engagement in verbal transmission. At a higher
level, that of “pure” or “natural” pratibhā, the very distinction of “perfected”
(saṃsk+ta) language and cognition vanishes into a mere propensity for differentiation.
On an individual level, however, insight is produced as a result of “perfection”
(*saṃskāra) of the knowing subject by his participation, in various degrees and by
various means, in the linguistic essence of reality.

2.3 Linguistic insight: a pragmatic view of language?

57
Svav+tti on VP 1.111 [= RAU 1.123]: saṃvijñānapadanibandhano hi sarvo ’rthaḥ (…) vyavahāram
avatarati (p. 182.3-4). On the interpretation of the compound saṃvijñānapada, see OGAWA (2009).
58
See Svav+tti on VP 1.111 [= RAU 1.123]: ṣaḍja+ṣabhagāndhāradhaivataniṣādapañcamamadhyamā-
nāṃ cānavasthitāprasiddhasaṃvijñānapadānāṃ viśeṣo ’vadhāraṇanibandhanapadapratyayam antar-
eṇa nāvadhāryate; “The difference between [the seven musical notes] ṣaḍja +ṣabha gāndhāra dhaivata
niṣāda pañcama and madhyama cannot be ascertained without a cognition of the [corresponding] words,
which are the basis for that ascertainment” (p. 182.4-6 – slightly modified; I do not understand Iyer’s
text for the passage viśeṣo(ṣā?)’vadhāraṇā nibandhana°, and therefore prefer to keep the reading found
in the Lahore edition of the first kāṇḍa; see BIARDEAU [1964a, p. 152]).
59
This definition, although itself quite general, seeks to avoid a purely negative characterisation of
pratibhā as “immediate cognition produced by any other cause than the cause of perception”, which
would also be perfectly adequate, though considerably less explicative.

20
Against this background, we now have to re-consider Bhart"hari’s specific use of this
“general” concept of pratibhā in the specific context of his analysis of linguistic utter-
ances. On the general map of pratibhā we have been drawing in the preceding two sub-
sections, “linguistic” insight – i.e. insight taking place in a listener following a
speaker’s utterance – is nothing but a particular case of pratibhā born from “training”
(abhyāsa), as appears from Bhart"hari’s seminal statement in VP 2.117-118:

Some teach that all speech[-units] are the cause of an insight (pratibhāhetu) because of
training (abhyāsād), just as when we convey an object to infants or animals (2.117).
Such a training has no origin [in time] (anāgama), and it is what some people call “con-
vention” (samaya); it shows that, immediately after [hearing] a certain articulate sound,
a certain thing needs to be done (śabdād anantaram idaṃ kāryam) (2.118).60

Bhart"hari’s recourse to “training” in the linguistic domain should not utterly surprise
us. As we will recall, abhyāsa was already associated to the acquisition of “unfamiliar”
(aprasiddha) designations of entities such as rare currencies and musical notes – and
to the very possibility of perceptually apprehending those entities – in the first kāṇḍa
(see above, § 2.2). Here, however, abhyāsa assumes a much greater role, as it becomes
an explanatory principle for linguistic communication as a whole. The example of in-
fants (bāla) and animals (tiryañc) deliberately excludes any recourse to a process of
“expression” or “reference”, and rather suggests that linguistic comprehension hap-
pens on a purely pragmatic basis: when the elephant-keeper or the horse-rider strikes
the animal with the hook or the shoe to make it move forward, the stroke functions as
a mere signal that something needs to be done; we do not suppose that the stroke would
possess a “meaningfulness” or an “expressive capacity” other than that consisting in
its mere association with a given course of action through training, which allows the
animal to react in the expected way. Whether or not the animal also has a representa-
tion of what needs to be done, or of the situation as a whole, is beyond the point here,
since that representation – assuming it exists – would not have any explicative role in
accounting for the animal’s behaviour.61

60
abhyāsāt pratibhāhetuḥ sarvaḥ śabdo ’paraiḥ sm+taḥ | bālānāṃ ca tiraścāṃ ca yathārthapratipādane
|| 2.117 || anāgamaś ca so ’bhyāsaḥ samayaḥ kaiś cid iṣyate | anantaram idaṃ kāryam asmād ity upa-
darśakaḥ || 2.118 ||. It is noteworthy that the later tradition generally quotes k. 2.117 with a reading
samāsataḥ instead of ’paraiḥ sm+taḥ in pāda b. See for instance Vidhiviveka (S p. 118-119), Tattva-
saṃgraha 892 (TSK) / 891 (TSD) and Sucarita Miśra’s Kāśikā (vol. 1 p. 66.18-19), which only quotes k.
2.118ab and 2.117ab in that order. In any case, the attribution of this view to Bhart"hari appears to be
coherent with the immediate context of these verses in the second kāṇḍa (at least, for what we can guess
in the absence of the Svav+tti), since VP 2.116 gives a generic statement on the multiplicity of opinions
regarding the object of a sentence, not a particular view which could be contrasted with the present one
as belonging to “others”. Thus, unless otherwise proved, I do not consider that Bhart"hari is referring
here to the opinion of any thinker other than himself.
61
On this process, see also Kamalaśīla’s explanation while commenting on VP 2.117 / Tattvasaṃgraha
892 (TSK) / 891 (TSD): yathaiva hy aṅkuśābhighātādayo hastyādīnām arthapratipattau kriyamāṇāyāṃ
<kriyamāṇāyām TSPK: kriyamāṇāyā TSPD> pratibhāhetavo bhavanti, tathā sarve ’rthavatsaṃmatā
v+kṣādayaḥ śabdā yathābhyāsaṃ pratibhāmātropasaṃhārahetavo bhavanti, na tv arthaṃ sākṣāt prati-
pādayanti. anyathā hi kathaṃ parasparaparāhatāḥ < parasparaparāhatāḥ TSPK: paraspasparāhatāḥ
TSPD> pravacanabhedā utpādyakathāprabandhāś ca svavikalpoparacitapadārthabhedadyotakāḥ syur

21
The incapacity in which the animal (or the infant) finds itself to explain why it is acting
the way it does is not primarily due to the trivial fact that it does not possess language.
Rather it appears as a general characteristic of any kind of “true” understanding for
Bhart"hari (that is to say, understanding which is more than purely lexical comprehen-
sion), as he regularly makes clear in passages of the VP dealing with pratibhā born
from “training”. Recall that insight is precisely said to be “impossible to explain to
others” (anyeṣām anākhyeyā – VP 2.144ab), and even “indescribable for him who has
it” (kartrāpi na nirūpyate – VP 2.144d) in the main description of “linguistic” insight
in VP 2.143-145 (translated above – Section 1). The same quality of being “inexplica-
ble to others” (pareṣām asamākhyeyam – VP 1.35a) is also applied, in strikingly simi-
lar terms, to the knowledge of the skilful gemmologist, etc. in VP(SV) 1.35 (translated
above – § 2.2). Indeed, inexplicability appears as one of the most constant character-
istics of insight acquired from abhyāsa: when the expert accepts some currencies as
authentic and rejects others as fakes, he does not (or at least, not necessarily) know
why he does it in that way. Yet his decisions are not done at random; they are as con-
fident – if not more – as any behaviour resulting from an intense reflection on reasons
and principles. In a way, he acts like the animal responding to the master’s stroke, not
because his decision would be purely mechanical, but because it is immediate and free
of conscious deliberation (again, that deliberation might happen in some situations
does not prove that it must happen in all of them). It does not sound like an absurd
thing to say that we react to explicit sentences in a language we are familiar with in
exactly the same way, with the same amount of confidence and the same lack of ab-
stract reflection as shown by a skilled pianist executing a difficult piece. In this respect,
the question whether sentences to which we so respond are explicitly injunctive sen-
tences or declarative ones appears of little relevance, since we would probably not
react differently should someone say “Close the door!” or “The door is open!”.

Three passages of the Svav+tti of the first kāṇḍa remain to be investigated, where prat-
ibhā is mentioned by Bhart"hari in the same sense and – as I shall argue – with the
same theoretical implications as in what precedes (on VP 1.24-26 [two occurrences]
and on VP 1.114 [= RAU 1.130]). All of them have been discussed in some detail by
OGAWA (2012a), and taken as an argument in favour of his view of pratibhā as a cog-
nition of the object of the sentence, responsible for an activity insofar as it represents
an action delimited by various factors (see above – Section 1). Since Ogawa’s inter-
pretation appears to be in contradiction with the view of language I have just attributed
to Bhart"hari on the basis of a few kārikās from the second kāṇḍa, it is essential to
take, once again, this evidence into consideration.

iti; “Just as the stroke of a hook, etc. is the cause of an insight in the elephant, etc. when we produce in
it the cognition of an object, so all speech[-units] like v+kṣa, etc., commonly believed to have an object
(arthavatsaṃmata) are the cause for bringing in (upasaṃhāra) an insight, and nothing else; they do not
directly convey any object. Otherwise, how could particular utterances which are mutually contradic-
tory take place, or fictional narrative compositions, manifesting entities that are the fruit of one’s imag-
ination?” (Tattvasaṃgrapañjikā 892/891 [TSPK p. 286.15-19 / TSPD p. 353.13-17]).

22
We may start with the second passage (VP[SV] 1.113-114 [= RAU 1.129-130]), where
Bhart"hari considers once again – although from a slightly different angle – the exam-
ple of the infant (bāla). As in the case of the animal, discussed above, the infant’s
“insight” plays the role of a cause for a specific activity, namely his first elocution
consisting of “positioning the organs [of phonation], etc. [so as to produce a sound]”
(karaṇavinyāsādi – p. 187.6-188.1). By stating that such an incipient movement of the
child’s phonatory organs is “obtained through an insight” (pratibhāgamya – p. 187.6)
and “not achieved by teaching” (anupadeśasādhya – ibid.), Bhart"hari does not only
avoid the circularity attached to the idea that our very first verbal activity would pre-
suppose teaching, which is itself a verbal activity.62 He also connects the infant’s ac-
tivity in general to the sphere of language, using concepts we have already seen at
work in the verses of the second kāṇḍa quoted in the beginning of this sub-section.
While Bhart"hari speaks in VP 2 of “a training that has no origin [in time]” (anāgamaḥ
[…] abhyāsaḥ), the production of insight is attributed in VP 1 to a “beginning-less
verbal impulse” (anādiḥ […] śabdabhāvanā – p. 187.5), two expressions which are,
in my opinion, exactly equivalent.63 Similarly, the idea that “even the infants’ under-
taking this or that efficacious act is caused by some unspeakable word” (bālānām api
[…] tāsu tāsv arthakriyāsv anākhyeyaśabdanibandhanā pratipattiḥ - p. 187.1-2)
strongly resonates with the idea of pratibhā as a cognition whose contents “cannot be
explained to others”, and which causes activity.

62
For a good formulation of this issue, see Śrīv"ṣabha’s comments on VPSV 1.114: yady apīdam idaṃ
ca sthānaṃ vyāpārayety upadiśyate bālānām, tathāpi pratibhodghāṭanamātram eva śabdāḥ kurvanti,
yatas te ’py upadeśaśabdā bālasyāprasiddhasaṃbandhā eva. tata upadeśaḥ pūrvaśabdabhāvanābīja-
v+ttilābham eva karotīti; “Even if children are taught to operate this or that place of articulation, such
words [pronounced by an adult] merely trigger (°udghāṭanamātraṃ kurvanti) their insight, for a child
is not yet familiar with the relation of these very words of teaching [with their object]. Therefore, teach-
ing is responsible only for the activation of those seeds of impulses left by past verbal units” (Sphuṭā-
kṣarā p. 188.10-13).
63
On the equivalence of abhyāsa and (śabda)bhāvanā, see for instance Śrīv"ṣabha’s Sphuṭākṣarā on
VPSV 1.113: bhāvanā abhyāsaḥ; “‘Impulse’ means ‘habit’” (p. 187.8). The equation of anādi and
anāgama is more difficult to establish, in the absence of an early commentary on VP 2.118. However,
it is strongly suggested by Bhart"hari’s use of the compound anāgamāpāgama (“Without coming or
going”) in VPSV 2.33 (p. 207.14-15), as an elaboration of nitya (“permanent, eternal”), qualifying the
essence of speech and reality (śabdārthatattva). After Bhart"hari, the equivalence between anāgama
and anādi is accepted, at least, by Vācaspati Miśra, commenting on VP 2.118 (as quoted by Maṇḍana)
in the Nyāyakaṇikā: āgamyate prāpyate ’smād iti kāraṇam āgamaḥ, avidyamāna āgamo yasminn asāv
anāgamaḥ, anādir ity arthaḥ; “āgama (‘origin’) means kāraṇa (‘cause’), for it is that from which some-
thing comes (āgamyate), i.e. by which it is produced (prāpyate); when there is no āgama in something,
it is said to be anāgama (‘without an origin’), that is to say beginning-less (anādi)” (S p. 120.3-4).
Puṇyarāja’s (presumably later) gloss, though less precise, goes in the same direction: sa cābhyāso
’nāgama idānīntano na bhavati. na hi bālasya tadaivopadiṣṭaṃ kena cid iti janmāntarabhāvy eva; “Such
a training is anāgama, i.e. it does not take place in the present time, for the infant is not taught by
anybody at the time [when he begins to act], so it must pertain to a former birth” (Ṭīkā p. 58.1-2). In
view of this evidence, I do not see any good reason to understand anāgama in the exact reverse sense,
i.e. as “not something inherited from previous lives”, as is done by OGAWA (2012a, p. 6).

23
The last two occurrences we need to discuss of pratibhā in the specific sense of a
“linguistic understanding” are found in Bhart"hari’s long elaboration, in the Svav+tti
on VP 1.24-26, on the two-fold object of speech: the “object [resulting] from [gram-
matical] extraction” (apoddhārapadārtha) and that “whose character is fixed” (sthita-
lakṣaṇa). Unsurprisingly, pratibhā first appears in the middle of a discussion of the
second type of objects, those that are “grasped by [speech] in the form of sentences”
(vākyarūpopagraha – p. 67.1). There, Bhart"hari defines the moment of verbal com-
prehension as “the time when insight is brought in” (pratibhopasaṃhārakāla – p.
67.4).64 Śrīv"ṣabha, commenting on this somewhat difficult compound, insists that in-
sight is intimately connected with efficacious activity (arthakriyā): “‘at the time when
insight is brought in’, i.e. at the time of efficacious activity (arthakriyā), due to in-
sight’s being brought in”.65 The process described here takes place in two steps: first,
the listener “grasps separate word-objects” (vicchinnapadārthagrahaṇa – p. 67.2; vic-
chedapratipatti – p. 67.3); following this, an insight is manifested which, as in the case
of the infant or the animal, leads him to take an appropriate course of action. This
description is, of course, rigorously identical to that given in VP 2.143 – our “main”
discussion of pratibhā in the second kāṇḍa (translated above, Section 1) –, where in-
sight is similarly said to take place “after the objects [of individual words] have been
grasped separately” (vicchedagrahaṇe ’rthānām – VP 2.143a). The issue becomes
slightly more complex with the second occurrence of pratibhā in VPSV 1.24-26, in a
passage where Bhart"hari tells us more about the mental process leading to verbal
comprehension, and finally to efficacious activity:

A thing qualified by all its qualifiers, [in other words] a whole aggregate of connected
elements, becomes in a single moment the content of a unitary cognition; later, if one
wishes, it is divided by means of other cognitions. Even so, insight, which is about [a
certain] efficacious activity, does not arise without a new synthesis of what has been so
divided; and so, once again, one brings back to the mind the connected form.66

64
In her translation of this passage, M. BIARDEAU (1964a, p. 63) interprets the compound pratibho-
pasaṃhāra as a locative compound (“ramassée dans une intuition”). The same option is taken by OG-
AWA (2012a, p. 7) (“drawn into a pratibhā”), and it is true that nothing in Bhart"hari’s text or V"ṣabha’s
commentary forbids such an interpretation. However, it seems to me that this sense of upasaṃ-√h+ as
“drawing together into x” is not the most frequent in the VP. Consider, for instance, in the very same
portion of the Svav+tti, Bhart"hari’s statement that “unless a word [denoting] an action is brought in, it
is impossible to represent objects grasped by [individual] speech[-units]” (anupasaṃh+te […] kriyāpade
śabdopagrahāṇām arthātmanāṃ nirūpaṇaṃ na vidyate – p. 66.1; Biardeau [ibid.] translates here “si l’on
n’ajoute pas un verbe (…)”). In fact, it seems the idea of “bringing in (the word expressing) the action”
accounts for a good proportion of usages of upasaṃ-√h+ in the Svav+tti: upasaṃh+takriyam atra pa-
dam… (p. 68.1), kriyāpadopasaṃhāre tu… (VPSV 2.424 – p. 309.19), kriyāpadopasaṃhāreṇa tu vinā…
(ibid. – p. 309.20). Although the case of pratibhā is different, I do not see any good reason to think
Bhart"hari suddenly deviates from this well-established usage in our passage.
65
See Sphuṭākṣarā p. 67.25-26: pratibhopasaṃhārakāla iti. arthakriyākāle ’bhinnapratibhopasaṃhārāt.
66
Svav+tti on VP 1.24-26: sarvaviśeṣaṇaviśiṣṭaṃ hi vastu saṃsargiṇīnāṃ mātrāṇāṃ kalāpaṃ yauga-
padyenaikasyā buddher viṣayatām āpannam uttarakālam icchan buddhyantaraiḥ pravibhajate. pravi-
bhaktasyāpi cānusaṃdhānam antareṇārthakriyaviṣayā pratibhā notpadyata iti punaḥ saṃsargarūpam
eva pratyavam+śati (p. 75.2-5).

24
As we can see, the basic conception of pratibhā as being “about efficacious activity”
(arthakriyāviṣayā) remains unchanged, but the cognitive process leading to the pro-
duction of that practical insight in the case of a complex linguistic sign, like a sentence,
is described in some more detail; it involves four stages:

1. Unitary cognition of a specified thing.

2. Artificial division into separate elements through analysis.
3. New synthesis of what has been grasped in stage 1.
4. Insight, leading to efficacious action.

As appears from the lines quoted above, stages 2. and 3. are somewhat dispensible,
and merely depend on one’s wish (icch[ā]) to proceed with an analysis of what is first
known globally into artificially construed constituents. But the first cognition, where
the listener apprehends “a unitary action, [fully] specified, in which division into parts
is a product of mental construction” (kalpitoddeśavibhāgo viśiṣṭa ekaḥ kriyātmā – p.
67.1-2) is hardly done away with, at least in cases where pratibhā follows from the
actual utterance of a sentence by a speaker, and it could easily be confused with prat-
ibhā itself. Such a shortcut would precisely lead to Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa’s idea of “insight”
for Bhart"hari as the representation of an action specified by its factors.67 However, as
we have shown, even in the case of verbal comprehension stricto sensu such a repre-
sentation merely precedes the production of an insight, and plays no direct role in the
triggering of an activity. Leading to an activity, in turn, is perhaps the most constant
mark of pratibhā in all the passages considered so far. Of course, the representation of
an action delimited by factors plays no role whatsoever when pratibhā does not follow
from an explicit statement by a speaker; therefore, despite its apparent centrality in the
process leading to verbal cognition it appears to be quite inessential to the conceptual-
isation of insight as such.

It should now be clear that, despite the staggering diversity of its usages in the VP
(some of them traditional, others quite unique to the venerable grammarian), Bhart"-
hari’s concept of pratibhā always retains some dominant features: in every case we
are dealing with a cognition which is immediate and therefore impossible to verbalise
(we know we are thinking, but we cannot explain what we are thinking); that cognition
is produced by language in one form or another, and it is intrinsically dynamic, either
as a mere “propensity for”, as a special ability, or as the direct cause of a listener’s
fully-fledged activity. Like other modes of insight discussed in the beginning of this
section, “linguistic” pratibhā arises as the result of a “preparation” of the knowing
subject, consisting in his participation in the language sphere through training within
a linguistic community. As in the case of spontaneous behaviours of small children
(taking the breast, imitating sounds, etc.), or immediate responses expected from
tamed animals, insight mainly allows one to take an appropriate course of action in a
given situation, without necessarily implying a conscious consideration for “means”

67
On Nāgeśa’s interpretation of pratibhā, see above, Section 1.

25
or “goals”. What Bhart"hari aims at, by using all the resources of his time’s philosoph-
ical anthropology, is therefore no less than a true concept of linguistic “understand-
ing”; one, that is, not merely consisting in the mental arrangement of semantic “parts”
into a complex “whole” which, reflected in cognition as it would be in a mirror, could
be further integrated into a chain of reasoning and inferences. Understanding, for
Bhart"hari, is essentially the work of language in a person able to receive it – a “ra-
tional agent”, in that limited sense –, and mainly consists in that agent’s propensity for
activity in a situation which suddenly “makes sense” for him.

Having said that, we are still far from a proper epistemological comprehension of in-
sight for Bhart"hari. For such a description leaves many questions unanswered: if prat-
ibhā is an immediate cognition informed by language, and as such leads to an activity,
what is it that makes the person act? Is that an intrinsic property of the cognition itself,
or rather of its intentional content? And in fact, what is this content? Or could it be that
it simply does not have a content? Moreover, one feels allowed to ask at this point how
far this redefinition of Bhart"hari’s concept of insight is at all helpful in understanding
his identification of pratibhā as the object of the sentence. These questions, I believe,
do not find a clear answer within the Bhart"harian corpus as it stands, yet they become
central in philosophical discussions of pratibhā in subsequent centuries, which will
always take place in direct reference to the VP. In the last section of this essay, I will
therefore consider some early interpretations of Bhart"hari’s thought. This will allow
us, I hope, to shed light on some aspects of the concept of pratibhā on which Bhart"hari
remains silent, and thereby to propose a plausible solution to the main issue at stake.

Section 3 – Cognition without an object? Pratibhā after Bhart#hari

3.1 Maṇḍana Miśra: pratibhā as the cause of an activity

Among early interpreters of Bhart"hari’s theory of pratibhā, Maṇḍana Miśra (660-

720) deserves a special place, both by the thoroughness of his treatment of ideas issu-
ing from the VP and because of his somewhat ambivalent attitude towards his great
predecessor. Maṇḍana discusses pratibhā thrice in his work, on two occasions in the
Vidhiviveka (henceforth ViV; v+tti on k. 2 [pūrvapakṣa] and k. 29 [uttarapakṣa]), then
much more briefly in the first book of the Brahmasiddhi (henceforth BSi), generally
believed to be his last work (prose portion under k. 1.1). These elaborations go along
with the quotation of numerous verses from the VP, eight overall, which is quite far
above Maṇḍana’s usual standards.68 Those discussions do not all have the same value,
nor the same function in the elaboration of Maṇḍana’s thought. The lengthy discussion
of pratibhā in the v+tti on ViV 29 is largely polemic, in line with Maṇḍana’s general

68
The full list of VP-quotes in these sections is as follows: on ViV 2 – VP 2.117-118ab; on ViV 29
(prose introduction) – VP 1.114 (= RAU 1.130), 2.145-147, 2.149-150. I have been unable so far to
locate any indisputable allusion to the Svav+tti in the ViV, although such allusions might very well exist.
A systematic comparison of the prose introduction to ViV 29, in particular, and selected passages from
the Svav+tti of the first kāṇḍa shall be carried out in a further study.

26
hostility towards Bhart"hari’s ideas in the ViV.69 The discussion in the BSi, though it
heavily draws on the former, is much more favourable to the great grammarian, and
has a place in the larger context of Maṇḍana’s constructive adaptation of Bhart"hari’s
linguistic monism in the first part of his Vedāntic magnum opus. If the use of argu-
ments from the ViV is rather common in the BSi, the adoption of a position so vehe-
mently criticised in an earlier work is, in turn, quite exceptional in Maṇḍana’s work,
and may well be the sign of a change of attitude towards Bhart"hari between the time
of composition of the two treatises. Whatever the case may be, the theory of pratibhā
outlined in both works remains essentially the same, and it is that theory – be it re-
garded as definitive or as merely provisional – that we now need to investigate.

The very localisation of Maṇḍana’s main development on pratibhā in the ViV suggests
that this concept does not belong, in his view, to a general theory of signification or
linguistic communication, but rather to a theory of human action and injunction: it is
only as a possible “cause of an activity” (prav+ttihetu) for living beings that pratibhā
is of interest to Maṇḍana, and only injunctive sentences are able to produce such a
cognition. “Independent” pratibhās of Vedic sages and musical experts are not his
main concern, nor is insight born from explicit utterances unless they are, lato sensu,
of an injunctive nature.70 A closer look at the ViV further reveals that Maṇḍana oper-
ates a very selective reading of Bhart"hari’s verses on pratibhā. Six stanzas of the VP
are quoted and paraphrased in the prose portions around ViV 29 (VP 1.114, 2.145-
147, 2.149-150), and two more are alluded to (VP 2.143, 2.148), all of which deal with
pratibhā as the insight guiding one’s actions. No allusion whatever is made to the idea
of pratibhā as the object of a sentence, to its function in the process of communication,
or to its identification with more subtle forms of speech as theorised in the first kāṇḍa.
A similar impression is made by the parallel passage in the Brahmasiddhi. There, the
context is Maṇḍana’s famous explanation of Brahman as akṣara, the “Sound” or “Pho-
neme”, in reference to VP 1.1b ([...] śabdatattvaṃ yad akṣaram; BSi p. 16.23sq.). In
order to substantiate his claim that all objects appearing in the world are nothing but
(real or illusory) evolutes of speech (vāco vipariṇāmo vivarto vā – p. 18.2), Maṇḍana
examines four categories of objects of our experience arguably not having any inde-
pendent existence in the outside world, and therefore merely consisting of “manifesta-
tions of speech” (śabdavivarta): injunctions and prohibitions (vidhi/niṣedha), the ob-
ject of a sentence (vākyārtha), collective entities (samūha) like forests, etc. and unreal
objects (asant) such as hare’s horns, square circles and the like. Significantly, the con-
cept of pratibhā only comes up in the discussion of injunctions and prohibitions, while

69
On Maṇḍana’s polemics against the grammatical interpretation of injunctive suffixes, the main topic
of the ViV, see DAVID (2013). Numerous examples of anti-grammatical – and even specifically anti-
Bhart"harian – polemics could easily be found in the ViV’s “twin”-treatise, the Bhāvanāviveka, which
still awaits a proper historical and philosophical study.
70
I say lato sensu because the injunctive nature of a sentence is not coextensive, in Mīmāṃsā, with the
utterance of explicitly injunctive morphemes, like suffixes of the imperative, etc.

27
the object of a sentence is explained, in traditional Mīmāṃsaka terms, as an “associa-
tion” (saṃsarga) between word-objects.71

What, then, is pratibhā for Maṇḍana Miśra? The concept appears for the first time in
the ViV in the form of a quote of VP 2.117-118ab (translated above, § 2.3), two verses
which, as we will recall, lay the basis for Bhart"hari’s pragmatic interpretation of lan-
guage, ascribing to “training” (abhyāsa) the role usually devoted to “expressive” or
“denotative” capacities of linguistic units. The quote is found rather towards the be-
ginning of Maṇḍana’s pūrvapakṣa, as part of his argument against the view that
speech-units (śabda) – suffixes of the imperative, the optative, etc. – cause the lis-
tener’s activity mechanically, without the intermediary cognition of an object (artha)
that would be expressed by those units. Language, in that view, operates in the manner
of a church-bell “telling” us it is time to go for mass or, to take Maṇḍana’s example,
like the sound of a conch (śaṅkhadhvani) making us start to act supposing we have
learnt that “when the conch sounds, one should act” (śaṅkhaśabdāt pravartitavyam
iti).72 The similarity of this view with that exposed in VP 2.117-118 is striking indeed,
and one would probably expect Maṇḍana to quote those verses in support of such a
view.73 Instead, they are embedded in a terse dialectical exchange, which is not easy
to summarise. The immediate context is Maṇḍana’s argument that language cannot
function without prior cognition of the relation (saṅgati, saṅketa) with its object, in
other words without a prior knowledge of its expressive power (śakti). If language –
so it is argued – were able directly to provoke the listener’s activity, without first of
all conveying a certain knowledge-content, speech would be similar to any other “pro-
ductive” cause (kāraka[hetu]) – the seed producing the sprout, for instance – and
would not require such a prior cognition. The discussion proceeds as follows:

Now, somebody might say that, even when a speech[-unit] is the productive cause (kāra-
kahetu) of [the listener’s] cognition of what is expressed, it requires a cognition of [the
words’ expressive] power, and that similarly [when it causes the listener’s activity, it
requires] the knowledge of [that speech-unit’s] power [to provoke] that activity. But
even he who says so does not prove that this requirement of a cognition [of the power of
the cause] exists for any [cause] other than a cause of knowledge (jñāpakād anyatra), for
we explain “cause of knowledge” precisely as “cause for the production of knowledge”
(jñāpaka = jñānakāraka). [Objection:] the eye, although a cause for the production of
knowledge (jñānakāraka), does not require a cognition of its power [in order to produce

71
See BSi p. 19.1-2: vākyārthaḥ saṃsargaḥ, na saṃsargivyatirekeṇa kaś cit; “The object of a sentence
is an association, [and] it is not anything distinct from things that are related.”
72
See ViV 2 (v+tti) S p. 87-88. For a general outline of this view and of Maṇḍana’s arguments against
it, see STERN (1988, p. 17-18) and DAVID (2015, p. 580-584).
73
As a token of this similarity, compare, for instance, Maṇḍana’s formulation śaṅkhaśabdāt pravarti-
tavyam in the ViV with Bhart"hari’s anantaram idaṃ kāryam asmāt in VP 2.118cd. The parallel between
this last expression and Maṇḍana’s description of pratibhā as a cognition having the form idam ittham
anena kartavyam in the prose introduction to ViV 29 (translated below) has been rightly pointed out by
OGAWA (2012a, p. 5).

28
 it]. – What of it? [O.] The undesired consequence that speech is not an efficient cause.74
– This is another defect of yours! [O.] Then, how does the cognition of an object take
place? – Through training (abhyāsāt), like [the cognition born from] being hit by a whip
or a hook, as [Bhart"hari says]: “All speech[-units] are the cause of an insight because
of training (…)” (VP 2.117-118a).75

If we stick to the letter of this passage, “training” (abhyāsa) is introduced by Maṇḍana

with the specific aim of explaining how a speech-unit can produce the cognition of an
object – how it can be a “cause of knowledge” (jñāpaka[hetu]) – without being, first
of all, the productive cause (kāraka[hetu]) of that knowledge. But the context of heated
polemics in which this remark is made, as well as the absence of further reference to
this explanation of verbal knowledge through training elsewhere in the ViV, discour-
ages me from seeing in it much more than a circumstantial claim, without very strong
theoretical implications. In fact, there is little doubt that Maṇḍana, like any other
Mīmāṃsaka in his time, would generally accept the idea of an expressive power (śakti)
of linguistic units, and the explanation of that power in terms of causation of an ob-
ject’s representation in the listener’s mind. We should, then, probably look elsewhere
for a positive account of pratibhā in the ViV.

Such a positive account is found in the prose introduction to ViV 29, immediately after
the demonstration, in ViV 26-28, of Maṇḍana’s main thesis that all injunctive sen-
tences express the means for realising one’s desire (iṣṭasādhana).76 Having thus re-
vealed his own view on action and injunction, Maṇḍana immediately raises the follow-
ing objection:

[Objection:] still, one acts because of the idea that something needs to be done
(kartavyam iti). For how could someone having such an idea fail to act? Surely, if some-
one sees gold and says “clay”, what answer could he be given? [Question, to the oppo-
nent:] but what is the object (artha) [referred to when you say] “This needs to be done”?

74
At first sight, this objection looks logically flawed: what was said before by Maṇḍana is that all causes
requiring the preliminary cognition of their (causal) power in order to produce their effect are ipso facto
causes of knowledge (jñāpakahetu); but this rule clearly does not imply the reverse, namely that all
causes of knowledge require such a cognition; the eye, for instance, does not, and this causes no harm
to the initial claim. I think the argument starts to make better sense if we assume that the objector’s
point is precisely to contest the intuitive equivalence between “cause of knowledge” (jñāpaka) and
“cause for the production of knowledge” (jñānakāraka), posed by Maṇḍana in the preceding lines. What
is proposed by the objector, then, is to take the problem the other way around by considering the absence
of a preliminary cognition to be a universal mark for efficient causes (kāraka). The eye, which does not
require such a cognition, therefore qualifies as a kāraka, but language does not, since it requires a prior
cognition of language’s expressive power. Perhaps it is correct, so the argument goes, to call language
a jñāpaka; but, in any case, it cannot be a kāraka.
75
ViV 2 (v+tti): yo ’py āha abhidheyavijñānaṃ prati kārakahetur api śabdo yathā śaktijñānam apekṣate,
tathā prav+ttiśaktisaṃvidam apīti, tenāpi na jñāpakād anyatra jñānāpekṣā pradarśyate, jñānakaraka-
syaiva jñāpaka ity ākhyānāt. nanu jñānakārako ’pi cakṣurādir na śaktijñānam apekṣate. kim ataḥ?
śabdasyākārakatvaprasaṅgaḥ. ayam aparo ’sya doṣaḥ. kutas tarhy arthāvabodhaḥ? abhyāsāt, kaśāṅku-
śābhighātavat. uktaṃ ca: “abhyāsāt pratibhāhetuḥ…” (S p. 109.1-120.1).
76
For a relatively detailed analysis of the initial portion of the ViV’s siddhānta, see DAVID (2013).

29
 – No [object] at all, [it is] an insight (pratibhā). [Q.:] then, what is that [insight]? – In-
sight is practical knowledge (prajñā) leading one to undertake (pratipattyanukūla)77
an action circumscribed by specific factors (niyatasādhanāvacchinnakriyā). That [in-
sight] is the cause of an activity, for no one undertakes an activity – even regarding
objects of perception, etc. – unless a specific insight is born in him that something needs
to be done by a certain means [and] in a certain manner (idam ittham anena kartavyam
iti). For it is led by insight that the world strives for activities.78

The position of this passage in the beginning of Maṇḍana’s siddhānta would be enough
to prove its importance. But it is remarkable in many other respects as well: to begin
with, it provides us with the oldest (and perhaps, the only) definition of pratibhā avail-
able in the whole philosophical corpus, one that Bhart"hari himself did not care to
provide (in bold). Of course, we cannot be sure whether this definition is Maṇḍana’s
creation or if it is borrowed it from an earlier source, but the proximity in time between
the two philosophers makes the latter hypothesis rather implausible (unless, of course,
the definition was found in a lost portion of the Svav+tti). Whatever the case may be, it

77
The interpretation of the word pratipatti in this definition is disputable, and constitutes a serious chal-
lenge to a proper understanding of Maṇḍana’s concept of pratibhā. In his translation of this passage of
the ViV, OGAWA (2012a) interprets pratipatti in its usual sense of “understanding”, an interpretation
that finds clear support in Vācaspati’s paraphrase: (…) kriyāyāḥ pratipattāv anukūlāṃ tatpratipattyā
kārye ’nuṣṭhānalakṣaṇe kartavye sahakāriṇīm (…) prajñāṃ pratibhām adhyagīṣmahe (Nyāyakaṇikā G
p. 176.7-9 [sahakāriṇo corrected to sahakāriṇīm following SD]). The whole definition is therefore trans-
lated as follows by Ogawa: “The pratibhā is the cognition which leads to the understanding of an action
that is qualified by specific sādhanas” (p. 4). This interpretation sounds implausible to me for several
reasons, the first being that it makes the definition redundant: if both prajñā and pratipatti mean some-
thing like “cognition”, how can we make sense of the idea that pratibhā is “a cognition conducive to a
cognition [of the action, etc.]”? Moreover, such an interpretation appears to contradict the reformulation
of the same definition by Maṇḍana himself in the BSi, where pratibhā is said to be “conducive to an
activity or the cessation of it” (prav+ttiniv+ttyanuguṇa – p. 18.23), anuguṇa being of course an exact
synonym of anukūla. I strongly incline to take pratipatti in the ViV as a quasi-synonym of prav+tti, all
the more since that usage of pratipatti, admittedly less common in general Sanskrit parlance, is well
attested in Bhart"hari’s work. Consider, for instance, VP 1.114 [= RAU 1.130], where it is said that “a
child undertakes activities” (bālaḥ […] pratipadyate […] itikartavyatā[m]) because of verbal impulses
coming from his previous lives or, in the corresponding Svav+tti, the consideration of children’s “un-
dertaking this or that activity” (tāsu tāsv arthakriyāsu […] pratipattiḥ [p. 187.1-2]). Clearly, Bhart"hari
is not speaking here of children having the cognition of an action – a case for which, to my knowledge,
he would always use the word kriyā, never the word itikartavyatā –, but of the child’s engaging in certain
activities (uttering sounds, etc.) because of past traces, etc. Admitting, as I do, that this is also the sense
of pratipatti for Maṇḍana in his definition of pratibhā allows us to avoid, I think, our two main difficul-
ties, since the definition is not redundant anymore (a cognition leads to an activity, not to another cog-
nition), and since it also becomes virtually identical to that of the BSi.
78
ViV 29 (prose introduction): nanu kartavyam iti pratipatteḥ prav+ttiḥ. kathaṃ hi tathā pratipadya-
māno na pravarteta? yo hi svarṇam upalabhya m+ttikety āha kas tasyottaraṃ dadāti <dadāti SD: dadyāt
G>? kaḥ punar ayam arthaḥ kartavyam iti? – na kaś cit. pratibhā. kā punar iyam? niyatasādhanāvac-
chinnakriyāpratipattyanukūlā prajñā pratibhā.a sā ca prav+ttihetuḥ.b na hīdam ittham anena kartavyam
ity anupajātapratibhābhedaḥ pravartate pratyakṣādyavagate ’py arthe. tatra hi pramāṇakāryasamāptiḥ.
pratibhānetro hi loka itikartavyatāsu samīhate (text as in SD; the text found in G [p. 174.2-176.3] is
identical except for the mentioned variant and for two sentences inserted in points a and b which, follow-
ing E. Stern, I consider to belong to the Nyāyakaṇikā). Parts of the same passage are translated by
OGAWA (2012a, p. 4-5), who follows the text of G.

30
is significant enough in Maṇḍana’s eyes to be repeated, in a slightly different form, in
the BSi (see below), and authoritative enough to be quoted verbatim by the Buddhist
thinker Kamalaśīla, commenting on VP 2.117 (as quoted by Śāntarakṣita) in the
Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā.79

According to Maṇḍana’s definition, insight has to do with an action (kriyā) character-

ised, in typically grammatical terms, as circumscribed by specific factors (ni-
yatasādhanāvacchinna) – the agent, the object, etc. –80; yet it is not the cognition of an
action (the action is not its “content”, viṣaya, as the pot is the content of its perception),
as rightly pointed out by Vācaspati in the Nyāyakaṇikā:

[Objection:] but, the action (kriyā) itself must be the content (viṣaya) [of that cognition],
so it is not without a content (nirviṣaya)! – [Maṇḍana] answers: “[it is] an insight” (prat-
ibhā). In fact, if [that cognition] had the action as its content, it would be the cognition of
that action (kriyāpratīti), and such a cognition is always about an action delimited by the
three [aspects of] time [= past, present and future], for instance [when we say] “He cooks”,
“He will cook”, “He cooked”, etc. This, however, [is an “insight” (pratibhā)] insofar as it
is practical knowledge (prajñā) manifesting (pratibhāsayantī) something [= the action]
which is not delimited by any of [the three aspects of time] – past, present and future – as
if it were an object of our experience.81

Verbal cognitions resulting from “indicative” verbal forms – pacati (“He cooks”),
apakṣīt (“He cooked”), etc. – represent the action; these forms speak of an action hav-
ing taken place in the past, currently taking place, etc. But the cognition resulting from
an imperative form like paca (“Cook!”) does not merely represent the action, rather it
suggests that the action “needs to be done”; it leads to the undertaking of that action,
instead of merely referring to it. Thinking of the imperative in a referential mode – as
describing “duty”, for instance, like a lyrical poem describes mountains and rivers – is
therefore taking things the wrong way. When I say “do this!”, I am not referring to a
“thing” existing on the mode of the imperative, or to my intention as a speaker; indeed,
I am not referring to anything at all. For all I want is to provoke the action, not to

79
TSPK 892 (p. 286.12-13) / TSPD 891 (p. 353.9): niyatasādhanāvacchinnakriyāpratipattyanukūlā pra-
jñā pratibhā.
80
Cf. for instance VP 2.47ab: niyataṃ sādhane sādhyaṃ kriyā niyatasādhanā |; “A process is regularly
connected to factors, and factors are regularly connected to an action”. Compared to this grammatical
(possibly Bhart"harian) description of the action, Maṇḍana’s final formula idam ittham anena kartavyam
is, in turn, clearly indebted to Kumārila’s theory of “effectuation” (bhāvanā) and its three members
(aṃśa): what is to be accomplished (sādhya), the instrument (karaṇa) and the procedure / auxiliary
(itikartavyatā). It is indeed remarkable that Vācaspati, glossing Maṇḍana’s expression niyatasādhanā-
vacchinna as sādhyasādhanetikartavyatāvacchinna (“circumscribed by something to be accomplished,
a means and a procedure”; Nyāyakaṇikā G p. 176.7 [text identical in SD]), resorts to exactly the same
Kumārilan (rather than Bhart"harian) background.
81
Nyāyakaṇikā on ViV 29 (prose introduction): evaṃ tarhi kriyaivāsyā viṣaya iti na nirviṣayety ata āha
– pratibhā. kriyāviṣayatve hi kriyāpratītiḥ <°pratītiḥ SD: °pratītiḥ syāt G>. sā ca traikālyāvacchinna-
kriyāgocarā, yathā pacati pakṣyati apakṣīd iti. iyaṃ punar atītānāgatavartamānānām anyatamenāpy
anavacchinnam anubhūtārtham <anubhūtārtham SD: adbhutārtham G> iva pratibhāsayantī prajñā (G
p. 176.9-13; text identical in SD, except for the two given variants).

31
describe it. In the framework of Brahmanical epistemology, defining knowledge prin-
cipally in terms of its objective content, such a view amounts to speaking of pratibhā
as a cognition that has “no object” (na kaś cid […] arthaḥ), an idea “without an exter-
nal referent” (nirālambana), as Maṇḍana says elsewhere,82 or – in Vācaspati’s terms –
a cognition “without a content” (nirviṣaya).

In the parallel passage of the BSi, Maṇḍana tells us a bit more about what he means by
saying that the action is not the “content” (viṣaya) of pratibhā:

Injunction and prohibition, to begin with, are not a past activity or the cessation of it, nor
are they present or future, for nothing would then differentiate [an injunctive verb, e.g.
paca, “cook”] from [indicative verbs such as] apakṣīt (“He cooked”), pacati (“He
cooks”) or pakṣyati (“He will cook”). If [you say that] they are something to be done
(kārya), I disagree, for the property of being something to be done, independently of the
three [aspects of] time, is yet to be explained. Therefore, injunction and prohibition are
nothing but a mere insight (pratibhā), not corresponding to any real thing (avastuka)
[and] favouring (°anuguṇa) activity or the cessation of it.83

As is clear both from this passage and from Vācaspati’s remark in the Nyāyakaṇikā,
quoted above, Maṇḍana’s main objection to the admission of an external referent for
practical knowledge is metaphysical rather than merely psychological: supposing that
the cognition “I have to do this” corresponds to an external object, something “to be
done”, would amount to saying that there are indeed some objects that exist without
any relation to either past, present or future; but this sort of “loose” metaphysical view,
admitting of no substantial relation between being and time, is one that Maṇḍana al-
ways firmly rejected, and against which he argues at length in the ViV (ViV 12-14) on
the background of his own definition of “existence” (sattā) as “presence” (var-
tamānatā).84 His basic argument against such a view is that there would be no way to
differentiate an object that never was, is not and will never be from a pure non-being
(asat), for perhaps the only manner to define non-being is precisely in temporal terms,
as something that is not, never was, and will never be.85

82
ViV 29 (v+tti) G p. 186.1.
83
tatra na tāvad vidhiniṣedhau bhūte prav+ttiniv+ttī, na ca vartamāne, na bhaviṣyantau, apakṣīt pacati
pakṣyatīty aviśeṣaprasaṅgāt. tasmāt prav+ttiniv+ttyanuguṇam avastukaṃ pratibhāmātraṃ vidhiḥ <vidhiḥ
em(HD): vidhi° Ed> niṣedhaś ca syātām (BSi p. 18.20-24).
84
On Maṇḍana’s view of existence as presence, see DAVID (2017b) and DAVID (forthcoming).
85
See ViV 12 (v+tti): yad api pramāṇāntarāṇāṃ kālavipariv+ttyarthaviṣayatvāt kurv iti tadaparāmarśād
ananyagocaratvam, tad yadi śabdataḥ, ghaṭādāv api prasaṅgaḥ. na hi ghaṭādiśrutayo ’pi bhūtādīnām
anyatamam ām+śanti. athārthataḥ, atyantāsattvaṃ khapuṣpādivat, tallakṣaṇatvād atyantāsattāyāḥ;
“Now, as to [the view] that means of knowledge other [than Scripture] are about [entities] evolving in
time, but that in kuru (‘do!’) there is no such [notion], and that therefore no other means of knowledge
can be about [the commandment expressed by this verb], [we make the following distinction:] if this
[absence of relation to time] is considered verbally (śabdataḥ), then even pots, etc. [would be similar to
commandments], for words like ghaṭa (‘pot’) do not evoke any of [the three aspects of time], the past
and the like. If it is with regards to the object (arthataḥ), then [the commandment] would essentially be
non-existent (atyantāsat), like a sky-flower, for such is precisely the character of entirely non-existent
things [that they do not exist in time]” (S p. 327.1 – 328.3).

32
In this framework, we can better understand Maṇḍana’s claim, in the BSi, that injunc-
tion and prohibition are “manifestations of speech” (śabdavivarta) or the parallel view,
in the ViV, that insight is “taking form under the aspect of verbal knowledge” (śabda-
jñānākāreṇa nirūpaṇā).86 For on the premise – generally granted in Brahmanical
schools of Maṇḍana’s time – that an idea has no aspect (ākāra) of its own, and given
that the cognition that “This must be done” is not about any object in the outside world
(since that object, the action, would always need to be produced in the first place),
what could possibly give it a form if not its cause, i.e. speech itself?

3.2 Dignāga’s pratibhā: plasticity, representation, and the role of mental traces

Now, Maṇḍana Miśra was not the first philosopher to characterise pratibhā as cogni-
tion “without an object / an external referent”. We come across exactly the same idea
in the words of Maṇḍana’s main predecessor in the field of Mīmāṃsā, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
(6th-7th c.), who alludes to this view in k. 40 of the apoha-section of the Ślokavārttika.
Interestingly enough, there, Kumārila also refers to Bhart"hari’s idea of insight as the
object of a sentence (vākyārtha):

Just as the insight which is the object of a sentence (vākyārthaḥ pratibhā)87 [arises in your
view] even in the absence of an external object (asaty api bāhye ’rthe), so the object of a
word will also be [a cognition without an external object]; why should one suppose an
exclusion (apoha) [as the object of a word]?88

The “view that the object of speech is a cognition” (buddhiśabdārthapakṣa), as it is

called by Sucarita Miśra, the 10th-century commentator on the Ślokavārttika, is not
Kumārila’s final position on the object of a sentence. It is mentioned here as a mere
example to counter the Buddhist claim that apoha is the object of nouns, and it will be
systematically criticised in k. 325-329 of the Vākyādhikaraṇa of the Ślokavārttika (pre-
sumably the source for Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s own criticism of pratibhā, mentioned in the

86
See ViV 29 (v+tti): nanu pratibhālambanasya svarūpato ’niṣpatteḥ śabdajñānākāreṇaiva nirūpaṇā;
“[Objection:] but, since the external referent of insight [i.e. an action, delimited by factors] always needs
to be produced (aniṣpatteḥ), that [cognition] can only take form under the aspect of verbal knowledge
(śabdajñānākāreṇa)” (G p. 203.1-2 – text identical in SD).
87
I am following here the recent critical edition of the apoha-section of the Ślokavārttika by KATAOKA
& TABER (2021). Earlier editions of the text read vākyārthapratibhā as a compound, sometimes inter-
preted by translators as a tatpuruṣa with underlying genitive relation, as in G. Jhā’s translation of this
verse: “a cognition (…) of the meaning of a sentence” (JHĀ [1985, p. 302]). This interpretation, how-
ever, is clearly invalidated by the occurrence of the same compound vākyārthapratibhā in Dignāga’s
auto-commentary on Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.46 (PIND [20151, p. 56]), as an equivalent of the expression
vākyārthaḥ pratibhākhyaḥ in the corresponding verse (translated below). If one adopts the reading of
earlier editions, the compound would therefore have to be read as a karmadhāraya in Kumārila’s verse
as well which, as we shall see, mostly relies on Dignāga.
88
Slokavārttika (apoha°) k. 40: asaty api ca bāhye ’rthe vākyārthaḥ pratibhā yathā || padārtho ’pi
tathaiva syāt kim apohaḥ prakalpyate || (Text: TABER & KATAOKA [2021, p. 24]).

33
beginning of this essay). Here is how Sucarita expands on this in his commentary on
the apoha-section, newly published by Kei KATAOKA (2015):

Nothing external stands as the object of the sentence [in this view] (vākyārtho na kiṃ cid
bahir asti), as [Kumārila] will explain in the liminary portion (pūrvapakṣa) of the “Chap-
ter on the Sentence”. And in the absence of such an [external] thing, they surmise that the
object of a sentence is just an insight (pratibhaiva […] vākyārthaḥ), manifesting either an
association (saṃsarga) or a difference (viccheda).89

Despite their relative briefness, we find in these statements the main element of
Mạṇdana’s analysis of pratibhā, namely the absence of an external referent (artha,
ālambana, vastu) for insight. What we do not find is the close connection between this
view and a theory of action and injunction, so peculiar to Maṇḍana’s use of that con-
cept. Kumārila is referring here to a less specific – but also more broadly explicative
– conception of insight as the generic object of linguistic utterances, which certainly
reaches back ultimately to Bhart"hari but, in the context of Kumārila’s refutation of
the typically Buddhist view of “exclusion” (apoha), is more likely to be Dignāga’s.

Dignāga, as is well-known, is the earliest advocate of Bhart"hari’s theory of pratibhā

or, to be more precise, its only known advocate outside the field of Vyākaraṇa if we
except the brief passage on injunctions and prohibitions from Maṇḍana’s Brahmasid-
dhi, quoted above (§ 3.1). Compared to Maṇḍana’s relative indifference to the question
of the sentence (vākya), we find in v. 5.46 of the Pramāṇasamuccaya a clear restate-
ment of Bhart"hari’s identification of pratibhā as vākyārtha:

The object of a word is mentally constructed (vikalpita) when it is extracted from the
sentence. Thus, what is produced in the first place is the object of the sentence (vākyār-
tha), which is called insight (pratibhākhya).90

The conception of pratibhā as a cognition without an object is, in turn, at the heart of
Dignāga’s next verse in the Pramāṇasamuccaya (5.47):

For through training (abhyāsa), [and] even without an [external] object (vināpy arthena),
various kinds of undertakings (pratipatti) arise from sentences, in accordance with one’s
cognition (svapratyayānukāreṇa).91

89
Kāśikā on Ślokavārttika (apoha°) k. 40: vākyārtho na kiṃ cid bahir <na kiṃ cid bahir var: na bahir
Ed> astīti vākyādhikaraṇapūrvapakṣe vakṣyate. tadabhāvāc ca pratibhaiva saṃsargavicchedaprati-
bhāsā vākyārtha ity ākṣiptam (Text: KATAOKA [2015, p. 432[73]]).
90
Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.46: apoddhāre padasyāyaṃ vākyād artho vikalpitaḥ | vākyārthaḥ pratibhākhyo
’yaṃ tenādāv upajanyate || (Text: PIND [20151, p. 55]). Similar translations in HATTORI (1979, p. 63)
and PIND (20152, p. 166).
91
Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.47: yathābhyāsaṃ hi vākyebhyo vināpy arthena jāyate | svapratyayānukāreṇa
pratipattir anekadhā || (Text: PIND [20151, p. 57]). Similar translations in HATTORI (1979, p. 65) and
PIND (20152, p. 172). On the interpretation of svapratyaya as “one’s cognition”, against the interpreta-
tion as “own cause” by HATTORI (1979, p. 65) following Jinendrabuddhi’s Ṭīkā, see the convincing
explanations by PIND (20152, p. 172-173, n. 580 and 586), who rightly traces the background of pādas
c and d to VP 2.134-135 (see following note).

34
As shown in a ground-breaking study by HATTORI (1979, p. 66), the idea that pratibhā
arises through “training” (abhyāsa) is directly borrowed by Dignāga from VP 2.117-
118, a passage we are now largely familiar with (see above § 2.3 and 3.1). The idea
that various kinds of undertakings arise from one and the same sentence in accordance
with one’s cognition is also a very clear echo of Bhart"hari, but it is not so evidently
put in connection with pratibhā by the famous grammarian, and it deserves some clar-
ification.92 Here is, first of all, Dignāga’s explanation in the auto-commentary on verse
5.47 of the Pramāṇasamuccaya:

Even in the absence of an external object, the undertaking of an efficacious activity (ar-
thakriyāpratipatti)93 arises from a sentence in various shapes (nānārūpā), in accordance
with one’s cognition [and] in dependence upon traces left by the training [in cognising
certain] objects, and [there also arises] a certain representation [of those objects] (vikalpa),
like when we hear [someone talking] about a tiger [when it is not there], for instance.
[This] also [happens] when [that external object] is identical, like when people listen to a

92
As PIND (20152, p. 172, n. 580) points out, the phrase pratipattir anekadhā is literally borrowed by
Dignāga from VP 2.134d, while the expression svapratyayānukāreṇa is found in the next verse of the
VP (2.135c). The corresponding portion of the Svav+tti is not available to us (it might have been to
Dignāga), and Bhart"hari’s statements in the kārikās are too loosely connected to be read in direct con-
tinuity with his developments on pratibhā in VP 2.143sq. Dignāga, on the other hand, establishes a clear
connection between Bhart"hari’s relativist view of perception and language in VP 2.134-142 and the
subsequent explanation of pratibhā. Whether this connection should be read back into Bhart"hari is an
interesting question, of course, but one that lies beyond the scope of this study.
93
This interpretation of Dignāga’s compound arthakriyāpratipatti is, I admit, not unproblematic, and is
in any case different from its interpretation by PIND (20152), who translates “a cognition about purpose-
ful action” (p. 173). The difficulty is somewhat similar to that already encountered in the interpretation
of the compound kriyāpratipattyanukūlā prajñā in Maṇḍana Miśra’s Vidhiviveka (see above, § 2.1 and
n. 77), and its solution should be comparable. In the present case, additional input is given by Jinen-
drabuddhi’s comment in the fifth chapter of the Pramāṇasamuccayaṭīkā, on which O.H. Pind’s inter-
pretation is based (see PIND [20152], p. 173, n. 582); it reads as follows: arthakriyāṃ pratipattā yayā
pratibhayotpannayā pratipadyate, sā ‘arthakriyāpratipattir nānārūpotpadyate’; “That insight by means
of which, when it arises, the listener (pratipatt+) undertakes (pratipadyate) an efficacious action, is the
‘idea [leading to] an efficacious action’ (pratipatti), [and] ‘it arises in various shapes’” (text quoted as
in PIND [20151], p. 57, n. 295; I translate). Jinendra’s analysis presupposes, I think, a grammatical der-
ivation of the word pratipatti by means of a primary suffix KtiN (A 3.3.94: striyāṃ ktin), usually found
in the sense of action (A 3.3.18: bhāve) but also accepted by Sanskrit grammarians in the sense of other
factors with the exception of the agent (A 3.3.19: akartari ca kārake saṃjñāyām), in the present case
the instrument (yayā […] pratipadyate, sā […] pratipattiḥ). This analysis, however, gives way to two
possible interpretations, depending on how one understands the verb pratipadyate in Jinendra: if one
takes it to mean “cognises”, as Pind seems to do, then Dignāga’s idea would be that one cognises by
means of an insight; if one understands it to mean “undertakes”, pratipatti becomes that (insight) leading
one to undertake an efficacious action. This last interpretation comes indeed very close to Maṇḍana’s
definition of pratibhā as “practical knowledge conducive to the undertaking of an action”, and appears
preferable. I do not think that it is possible to fully reconcile Maṇḍana with Jinendra, for in the first case
pratibhā is just “conducive to” (°anukūla) pratipatti, while in the second both are identified, but the
main idea appears to be similar. My interpretation differs from Jinendrabuddhi’s, who has already
proved inaccurate in this passage by lack of familiarity with Bhart"hari (see above, n. 91, the case of the
compound svapratyaya in k. 5.47 of Dignāga’s work), and rather builds on the proximity of Dignāga’s
terminology with Maṇḍana’s.

35
 love poem: by hearing it, those who [already] feel some passion will have a cognition
which is reflecting their passion (rāgānurūpā pratītiḥ), while in those who are indifferent
to such a feeling it will reflect only irritation (saṃvega).94

Dignāga draws our attention here to an important aspect of the theory of pratibhā,
which is entirely absent from Maṇḍana’s theorisation and is also not easily traceable
back to Bhart"hari himself, namely the extreme plasticity of insight compared to other
kinds of cognitive event: unlike theoretical knowledge (perception, for instance),
where the same cause always produces the same effect regardless of the moment or
the personality of the perceiver, in the case of insight the same cause (a sentence, for
instance) can produce several effects – activities, responses, reactions, etc. – depending
on the moment and situation, as well as on the character and past experiences of the
listener. In the words of Kumārila, no doubt drawing on those of Dignāga, “insight
arises in human beings in various ways” (pratibhānekadhā puṃsām […] jāyate),95 and
the only way to account for such a variety is by resorting to the cogniser’s former
experiences, active in the form of mnemonic traces (vāsanā).96

A slightly later text belonging to the Sāṃkhya tradition, the Yuktidīpikā (6th-7th cen-
tury?97), sheds additional light on Dignāga’s idea. It quotes verse 5.47 of the Pra-
māṇasamuccaya in its commentary on the fourth Sāṃkhyakārikā, and it also appears
to be the oldest available explanation of Dignāga’s example of the tiger (vyāghra),
later found in Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī and other sources, Buddhist as well as non-
Buddhist.98 The passage, which closely paraphrases the extract from Dignāga’s v+tti
quoted above, reads as follows:

94
Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.47 (v+tti): asaty api bāhye ’rthe svapratyayānurūpyeṇārthābhyāsavāsanāpekṣā
vākyād arthakriyāpratipattir nānārūpotpadyate vikalpaś ca, vyāghrādiśrutivat. tadaviśeṣe vā ś+ṅgāra-
kāvyasya śravaṇād rāgiṇāṃ rāgānurūpā pratītir bhavati, vītarāgāṇāṃ tu saṃvegānurūpā (text: PIND
[20151, p. 58]). My translation, though adapted to fit the conventions of this essay, heavily relies on the
interpretation of this passage by HATTORI (1979, p. 65) and PIND (20152, p. 173-175).
95
Ślokavārttika (vākya°) 325cd. Quoted and translated below, § 3.3.
96
This aspect of pratibhā, particularly prominent in Dignāga’s text, is still visible in Kamalaśīla’s re-
formulation of Bhart"hari’s theory while commenting on VP 2.117 / Tattvasaṃgraha 892 (TSK) / 891
(TSD): sā prayogadarśanāv+ttisahitena śabdena janyate. prativākyaṃ pratipuruṣaṃ ca sā bhidyate. sa
tu tasyā aparimāṇo bhedaḥ śabdavyavahārasyānantyān na śakyate vidhātum <vidhātum TSPK:
vighātum TSPD>; “It [= pratibhā] is produced by a speech[-unit] accompanied by the repeated obser-
vation of its usage; it differs with every sentence and with every person, but such an unfathomable
difference cannot be exposed, because linguistic communication has no limits” (Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā
892/891 [TSPK p. 286.13-15 / TSPD p. 353.9-11]).
97
The date of the Yuktidīpikā is not entirely settled, although it is unlikely to postdate Dignāga by more
than one or two centuries. WEZLER & MOTEGI (1998, p. XXVIII) propose the dates 680-720 since the
author of the Yuktidīpikā repeatedly quotes Dignāga, apparently ignores Dharmakīrti, and possibly
quotes a passage of the Kāśikāv+tti, a grammatical work presumably composed towards the end of the
7th century. This last claim has been contested by J. BRONKHORST (2003, p. 7-9), who appears uncon-
vinced that the quote is indeed from the Kāśikā, and therefore leaves the possibility open of a slightly
earlier date for the Yuktidīpikā. Bronkhorst’s arguments are reproduced, along with various other con-
siderations, in the introduction to the recent edition of the Yuktidīpikā by SHARMA (2018, p. lv-lxiv).
98
For a preliminary inventory of these sources, see PIND (20152, p. 173-174, n. 587).

36
 What is insight? Here is the answer: in this beginning-less world of transmigration, for a
single external object – a woman for instance –, a cognition taking various aspects such
as that of a dead body, a lover, food, etc., becomes the cause of an activity (itikarta-
vyatāṅga) for gods, men and animals [respectively], depending on traces left by their past
training (pūrvābhyāsavāsanā). That [cognition] is insight, as it is said: “For through train-
ing (…)” (Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.47). For when somebody is used to think of an object as
a source of pleasure, for instance, that thought arises for him from a simple talk [about
the object], even when that object is not actually there. For example, if somebody says
“This is where the tiger lives”, even in the absence of that external object (= the tiger), by
virtue of a mere training, [reactions] take place starting with sweating, trembling, etc.
Therefore, insight alone is the cause of the activity of gods, men and animals alike, and
that is why it is considered a means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa). And [Bhart"hari] also
says: “The whole world regards it as its supreme authority (pramāṇa); even the behav-
iours of animals take place only by its will” (VP 2.147).99

The two passages help us better to understand several important aspects of the concept
of pratibhā neglected so far by our analysis. While our efforts have been consistent in
showing that pratibhā is not (or at least, not just) the theoretical contemplation of an
“object”, be it a mental one, Dignāga reintroduces the notion of a “representation”
(vikalpa) into Bhart"hari’s understanding of insight. The two claims might not be as
contradictory as they seem: when a listener acquires the insight that will lead him to
an appropriate response following the utterance of a given statement (“There is a tiger
in there!”), he probably does have at the same time a certain reaction (trembling, flee-
ing etc.) and a certain representation, both of which depend on his particular back-
ground (that of a tiger hunter, by contrast with that of a traveller lost in a forest, for
instance). That, however, does not mean that the reaction is caused by that representa-
tion, or that making one realise the existence in a certain place of the object of the word
“tiger” constitutes the main function of that sentence. The Yuktidīpikā’s example of the
woman perceived diversely by gods, men and animals, presumably borrowed from
Buddhist sources as well,100 underlines in a vivid way the fundamentally interpretative
nature of that representation. In fact, for none of these three classes of beings is the
woman just a “woman”, connected by an eternal relation to that word, for even men
perceive it as a “lover” (kāminī), never just as a “woman”. Thus, there does not seem
to be any stage, in this process, where words in a sentence mean just what they mean.
By thus disconnecting the operation of the sentence (vākya) from the production of

99
Yuktidīpikā on Sāṃkhyakārikā 4: keyaṃ pratibhā nāma? āha – yo ’yam anādau saṃsāre devamanuṣya-
tiraścām abhinne ’rthe bāhye stryādau pratyaye pūrvābhyāsavāsanāpekṣaḥ kuṇapakāminībhakṣyādy-
ākārabhedabhinnapratyaya itikartavyatāṅgam utpadyate, sā hi pratibhā. tathā coktam – yathābhyāsaṃ
hi vākyebhyo (…). yena hi yo ’rtho ’bhyastaḥ sukhāditvena tasya vināpi tenārthena śabdamātrāt prati-
pattir utpadyate. tad yathā vyāghro ’tra prativasatīty ukte vināpi bāhyenārthenābhyāsavaśād eva sve-
davepathuprabh+tayo bhavanti. tasmāt pratibhaiva devamanuṣyatiraścām itikartavyatāṅgatvāt pra-
māṇam iti. āha ca – pramāṇatvena tāṃ lokaḥ sarvaḥ samanugacchati | vyavahārāḥ pravartante tiraścām
api tadvaśāt || (Text: WEZLER & MOTEGI [1998, p. 75], reproduced in SHARMA [2018, p. 75]).
100
See PIND (20152 p. 174-175, n. 588). Interestingly, a strikingly similar idea is voiced by Bhartṛhari
in the Svavṛtti on VP 2.436: ekā strī duhitābhaginībhāryāmātety apekṣāviśeṣaiḥ pravibhajyate; “The
very same woman appears, depending on particular expectations, as a ‘daughter’, a ‘sister’, a ‘wife’ or
a ‘mother’” (p. 313.5-6 – I thank Vincenzo Vergiani for drawing my attention to that passage).

37
meaning, Dignāga makes it a mere auxiliary to the pivotal operation of “mental traces”
(vāsanā). In the words of Jinendrabuddhi, no doubt faithfully expanding on Dignāga’s,
its function is just “to cause the awakening of mental traces” (vāsanā-
prabodhanimittatā).101 Those mental traces are variable from individual to individual,
constituted as they are in the course of fundamentally distinct (former-)life-experi-
ences.

3.3 Pratibhā as vākyārtha? Attempt at a synthesis

Having now reviewed the largest part of early sources on Bhart"hari’s notion of prat-
ibhā, it is high time we attempt a synthesis, and get back to our initial problem: that of
a possible identification of insight as “the object of a sentence” (vākyārtha) in VP
2.143. It appears that, beyond differences in emphasis and doctrinal affiliations, a fairly
homogeneous conception of insight emerges, rarely advocated as such but clearly rec-
ognisable throughout philosophical texts of the second half of the first millenium. Gen-
erally speaking, all authors we have been dealing with in this essay would agree to
speak of pratibhā as a cognition:

1. without a referent (artha, vastu, ālambana) in the external world

2. having the form of verbal knowledge (śabdajñānākāra)
3. arising because of traces (vāsanā, bhāvanā) left by training (abhyāsa) and
4. the direct cause of an activity or the cessation of it (prav+tti/niv+tti).

We may now attempt to summarise Bhart"hari’s conception of pratibhā in the linguis-

tic domain by contrasting it with what I would call the “referential” view on verbal
cognition, which is found in an overwhelming number of other, often Mīmāṃsā-in-
spired, Indian philosophical sources (including, of course, most of the sources dis-
cussed in the present volume):

101
See Pramāṇasamuccayaṭīkā: vākyasya vāsanāprabodhanimittatāṃ darśayituṃ vākyād ity uktam (text
as in PIND [20151, p. 57, n. 295]).

38
The “referential” view

vākya śābdabodha prav+tti/niv+tti

abhidhāna viṣayatā

artha

The “pragmatic” view

(artha)kriyāpratipatti
(1) (= prav+tti/niv+tti)

vākya pratibhā

vāsanāprabodha- vikalpa
nimittatā
vāsanā
(= śabdabhāvanā)

artha abhyāsa artha

39
No doubt, this tentative representation is still very sketchy, and leaves much space for
variation and further development. In particular, the relation marked (1) between prat-
ibhā and what is designated in various sources as (artha)kriyāpratipatti is far from
clear. While Dignāga’s formulation leads one to think of a simple identity, Maṇḍana
introduces the relation of “being conducive to” (anukūlatā), which rather suggests a
connection between distinct entities. Still, the difference between Bhart"hari’s prag-
matic view of linguistic comprehension and that of other medieval Indian thinkers,
considering verbal knowledge to be the theoretical representation of the object referred
to by a sentence, should by now have become evident.

In what sense, then, does it still make sense to speak of pratibhā as the “object” (artha)
of the sentence? Did we not just define pratibhā by saying that, precisely, it does not
have such an object? The only explicit and non-polemical answer to that question
stems, to the best of my knowledge, from Jinendrabuddhi, commenting on Dignāga’s
identification of pratibhā as vākyārtha in k. 5.46 of the Pramāṇasamuccaya.102 Jinen-
dra starts by distinguishing between two kinds of insight, that of the listener (śrot+)
and that of the speaker (vakt+), and establishes on this basis two senses in which prat-
ibhā could meaningfully be said to be the object of the sentence: in the case of the
listener as “what prompts” (prayojaka) the utterance, and in that of the speaker as
“what is to be known” (prameya) through the sentence. One can seriously doubt that
the second option – the speaker’s insight as “what is to be known” by the sentence –
faithfully reflects Dignāga’s opinion, as it seems too evidently indebted to Dhar-
makīrti’s later conception of the sentence as the inferential sign (liṅga) conveying the
speaker’s intention.103 The idea of the “object” (artha) of the sentence as what
“prompts” (pra-√yujcaus) the utterance of that sentence appears as a better candidate:
the listener’s intuitive comprehension itself can be said to be the “object” of the sen-
tence, not of course because that sentence refers to it, but because it justifies it (another,
perfectly legitimate, usage of the word artha).

This, clearly, was not to satisfy such a staunch advocate of the “referential” view as
Kumārila, earlier than Jinendra by at least a century but clearly familiar with the idea
of pratibhā as the “purpose” (prayojana) of the sentence:

Even if[, as you claim,] insight regarding objects arises for human beings in different
ways (anekadhā), we consider that there must be an external object (bāhya evārthaḥ) even
for that sentence. If you claim that the “object” (artha) is none but insight (pratibhā) itself,

102
Jinendrabuddhi’s commentary on Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.46 has been recently edited and translated
in PIND (20152, p. 166-167, n. 557). I am referring in what follows to O.H. Pind’s version of the text.
103
Consider, for instance, Jinendra’s final claim that “it [= the speaker’s insight] is inferred by means
of a sentence, which is an inferential sign [insofar as it is] an effect, just as we infer fire from smoke”
(sā hi vākyena kāryaliṅgenānumīyate dhūmenevāgniḥ).

40
 because it is the purpose of the sentence (vākyaprayojanatvena), or because it is produced
by it (janyatvena), we do not see any contradiction with our view.104

But what looks like a perfectly sound objection for someone reasoning in referential
terms becomes meaningless in Bhart"hari’s pragmatic perspective: the “purpose” of
using a sentence like “There are one hundred gold coins hidden behind that tree” –
inviting the listener to go and fetch them – is not something that would be added to the
normal, purely theoretical function of that sentence as a code passing forward a piece
of information: the only function of the sentence is to provoke a specific reaction;
whether or not a hundred gold coins are really hidden there is – for us philosophers at
least, if not for him who fetches them – beyond the point.

Conclusion
It should have become clear by now that, if Nāgeśa’s conception of Bhart"hari’s prat-
ibhā as immediate cognition having the object of a sentence as its content (viṣaya)
could be considered legitimate in the limited context of 18th-century Vyākaraṇa, it is
clearly not shared by most readers of Bhart"hari in the first millennium, and probably
should not be attributed to the author of the VP either: pratibhā, for Bhart"hari, is not
the understanding in a “flash” of an object that could also be represented otherwise, in
a more discursive manner by way of semantic and syntactic analysis. However, it
would be equally wrong to blame the author of the Laghumañjuṣā for this, for the
history of pratibhā after Bhart"hari essentially appears as that of its progressive exclu-
sion from the field of linguistic inquiry. When Bhart"hari first suggested that the main
function of language at the level of sentences might be pragmatic rather than theoreti-
cal, and may better not be thought within the framework of a theory of expression or
the production of valid knowledge, he did not just add – as many will do later on – one
more theory of signification to those already available in his time. His proposal con-
stituted a complete change of paradigm for sentence analysis, backed in metaphysics
(the higher levels of insight), psychology (training as a ruling factor for human behav-
iour and understanding) and anthropology (mental activity as a product of linguistic
traces from former lives). This new paradigm, still clearly recognisable in the works
of Dignāga, entirely disappears from the writings of Dharmakīrti, who opts for an in-
ferential paradigm for linguistic analysis. Already with Maṇḍana – probably the last
advocate of Bhart"hari’s view – it has lost most of its explicative power, being limited
to the specific case of injunctions and prohibitions. By the 8th or 9th century, the ques-
tion whether language mainly represents or instigates is not an issue anymore: no mat-
ter how, a sentence must be about something; the only question left is how it reaches
there. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Jayanta, in his brief but thorough
discussion of pratibhā as vākyārtha in the fifth āhnika of the Nyāyamañjarī, still re-
flects a conception of language that, by his time, had by and large fallen into desuetude.
His arguments, however, make it clear that this was not considered a viable option any

104
Ślokavārttika (vākya°) 325cd-327ab: pratibhānekadhā puṃsāṃ yady apy artheṣu jāyate || tathāpi
bāhya evārthas tasya vākyasya ceṣyate | vākyaprayojanatvena janyatvenātha vā yadi || ucyate pratibhāpy
artho na naḥ kiṃ cid virudhyate |

41
more: the conception of the sentence as a means of expression about facts had become
an evidence, which did not allow a deep understanding of Bhart"hari’s views any more,
and thereby excluded from Indian reflections on the sentence one of their most original
and promising dimensions.

42
Bibliography and abbreviations

Sanskrit sources

A = Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, quoted following RENOU (1966).

Abhinavabhāratī. See GNOLI (1968) and DAVID (2016).
Ambākartrī (vol. 1)
Vākyapadīyam (Part 1) (Brahma-Kāṇḍam). With the commentaries Svopajñav"tti
by Hariv+ṣabha & Ambākartrī by Pt. Raghunātha Śarmā. Benares (Varanasi):
Sampurnanand Sanskrit University. 1988 (third edition).
Ambākartrī (vol. 2). See Vākyapadīya – Svav+tti (VPSV 2 – Ed1968).
Kāvyamīmāṃsā
Kāvyamīmāṃsā of Rājaśekhara. Ed. C.D. Dalal & R.A. Sastry. Baroda: Oriental
Institute (Gaekwad’s Oriental Series 1). 1934.
Third edition, revised and enlarged – first published in 1916.
Kāvyādarśa
Kāvyādarśa of Mahākavi Daṇḍī. Ed. Acharya Ramchandra Mishra. Benares (Va-
ranasi): Chowkhamba Vidyabhawan (The Vidyabhawan Sanskrit Granthamala
37). 2005 (reprint).
Kāvyālaṃkāra
Kāvyālaṅkāra of Bhāmaha. Ed. Batuk Nāth Śarmā & Baldeva Upādhyāya. Benares
(Varanasi): Chaukhambha Sanskrit Sansthan (The Kashi Sanskrit Series 61).
1981.
Kāśikā (Sucarita Miśra)
The Mīmāṃsāślokavārtika with the Commentary Kāśikā of Sucaritamiśra. Ed. K.
Sāmbaśiva Śāstrī. Part 1. Trivandrum: Government Press (Trivandrum Sanskrit
Series 90 / Śrī Setu Lakṣmī Prasādamālā 2). 1926.
See also KATAOKA (2015).
Tattvasaṃgraha. TSK and TSD: see following entry, TSPK and TSPD.
Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā
TSPK: Tattvasaṅgraha of Śāntarakṣita. With the Commentary of Kamalaśīla. Ed.
E. Krishnamacharya. 2 vols. Baroda: Central Library (Gaekwad’s Oriental Se-
ries 30-31). 1926.
TSPD: Tattvasaṅgraha of Ācārya Śāntarakṣita. With the Commentary Pañjikā of Śrī
Kamalaśīla. Ed. Swami Dwarikadas Shastri. 2 vols. Benares (Vārāṇasī):
Bauddha Bhāratī. 1981 (vol. 1) and 1982 (vol. 2).
Nyāyakaṇikā. See Vidhiviveka.
Nyāyamañjarī
Nyāyamañjarī of Jayantabhaṭṭa, with Ṭippanī – Nyāyasaurabha by the Editor. Ed.
K.S. Varadacharya. 2 vols. Mysore: Oriental Research Institute (Oriental Re-
search Institute Series 116 & 139). 1969 (vol. 1) and 1983 (vol. 2).
Pramāṇasamuccaya and Pramāṇasamuccayaṭīkā. See PIND (20151 and 20152).
Praśastapādabhāṣya (= Padārthadharmasaṃgraha of Praśastapāda). See BRONK-
HORST & RAMSEIER (1994).
Brahmasiddhi (= BSi).

43
 Brahmasiddhi by Ācārya Maṇḍanamiśra with [the] commentary by Śaṅkhapāṇi.
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Yogasūtra
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VPSV 1:
Vākyapadīya of Bhart+hari with the commentaries V"tti and Paddhati of
V+ṣabhadeva. Kāṇḍa 1. Ed. K.A. Subramania Iyer. Poona: Deccan College
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VPSV 2:
M: paper transcript no. R-5543 (= S.R. 2924); Chennai, Government Oriental
Manuscripts Library.
1939/40
Ed : Vākyapadīyam. Bhart"haryupajñav"ttisanātham, puṇyarājaṭīkāsaṃ-
yutaṃ. Dvitīyaṃ kāṇḍam (dvitīyavibhāge prathamakhaṇḍaḥ). Ed. Cārudeva
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Ed1968: Vākyapadīyam. Part II: Vākyakāṇḍam by Bhart+hari, with the commen-
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1983
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Vidhiviveka
G = Vidhivivekaḥ of Śrī Maṇḍana Miśra, with the Commentary Nyāyakaṇikā of
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(Prācyabhāratī Series 8). 1978.
S = STERN (1988).

44
 SD = draft of a critical edition of the whole Vidhiviveka and Nyāyakaṇikā along
with two sub-commentaries by Parameśvara I, by Elliot M. Stern; latest version
dated 20th May 2019, quoted with the editor’s permission.
Ślokavārttika
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Nyāyaratnākara by Pārthasārathi Miśra. Ed. Rāmaśāstrī Tailaṅga. Benares: The
Secretary, Chowkhambā Sanskrit Series Office (Chowkhambā Sanskrit Series
3). 1898-1899.
See also KATAOKA & TABER (2021).
Sphuṭākṣarā (Śrīv"ṣabha) (= Paddhati of V"ṣabhadeva). See Vākyapadīya – Svav+tti
(VPSV 1).

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