Sophia

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00946-3

Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

Andrew Brandel1  · Veena Das2 · Michael Puett1,3

Accepted: 11 January 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023

Abstract
How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of
words and sentences? Analyzing words within the sentence as event-makers in Sanskrit
and as creating new possibilities and of divining events in Chinese, this paper argues that
writing commentaries, making translations, reciting texts and transcribing them, belong
to a family of activities that we normally do with language. Thus, movement of every
element of language from one place to another whether within a word, a character, a sen-
tence, a text or between two languages is not something added from the outside, it is inter-
nal to the experience of language. We ask what bearing might such an insight have on
dominant theories of translation and the untranslatable in contemporary theorizing that
has been framed primarily in terms of the history of Europe’s understanding of itself.

Keywords Translation · Indian philosophy · Chinese philosophy · Grammar ·

Theory of action

Language at Home Perhaps Nowhere, Perhaps Anywhere: Posing

the Problem

In the Vocabulaire européen des philosophie, Cassin (2014) makes the untranslatable,
understood as “symptoms of difference in languages,” into an explicit object of philo-
sophical reflection. Cassin writes that “one of the most urgent problems posed by the
existence of Europe is that of languages.” Following Benveniste, she argues that “in
order to find the meaning of a word in one language, this book explores, the networks
to which the word belongs and seeks to understand how a network functions in one lan-
guage by relating it to the networks of other languages” (Cassin, 2014: xvii); it is neces-
sary, in other words, to track how words are situated within the measurable differences

* Andrew Brandel
azb6169@psu.edu
1
Penn State University, State College, PA, USA
2
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
3
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

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 A. Brandel et al.

among languages. Contrasting this view with dominant models of “logical universalism”
and “ontological nationalism,” Cassin writes, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt (p. xix),
that “language appears in reality solely as multiplicity.” Multiplicity here takes a number
of forms within languages, and even within particular words.1 Charting this cartography
of differences is possible for Cassin and her colleagues because, as she acknowledges,
the book was able to capitalize on “the knowledge and experience of translators, and of
those translators (historians, exegetes, critics, interpreters) that we are as philosophers.”
This collaboration among the disciplines has resulted in a stunning tome and we are
indeed among the many writers on these issues who have benefitted from this largesse
on the part of Cassin, Laugier, and their colleagues.
In the book’s English guise, as the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the word
“Europe” is removed. In the translator’s preface, Emily Apter (2014) writes that the
decision to remove it was taken in hopes that future editions might include entries
on “philosophy hailing from countries and languages cartographically zoned out-
side of Europe; and because, philologically speaking, conventional distinctions
between European and non-European languages make little or no sense.”2The hope,
she writes, is that the diffusion of the book to other parts of the world, even if in
hegemonic English, might generate not just further translations, but “spin-off ver-
sions appropriate to different cultural sites and medial forms.”
In this essay, we want to take up this invitation by asking whether such a project
might be imagined rather differently if it began from other coordinates. However,
this task cannot just be a matter of incorporating local examples into our dominant
heuristics as a corrective to its oversights and elisions. Beginning from Europe also
shows itself, for example, in the lingering sense that a certain closure exists around
distinct languages. Or that some regions of language hew closer to the world than
others (as in conventional semiotics), or that translation is an activity primarily of
experts, rather than a normal condition of life in language. We suggest that it might
be interesting to start from a different place in taking forward the project Cassin and
her colleagues propose by asking how do we understand what language is or does,
in the first place. This is less a project about language ideology and more an inquiry
into the conditions of multiplicity implied by the coexistence of diverse languages
which bring into being such activities as interpretation, commentary, and translation,
through the help of apparatuses that may be considered internal to a language. At the
very least, this exercise might trouble the simple notion of a meaning as attaching
to a word or of being the same kind of entity as the word and the activity of transla-
tion as finding equivalences between words or strings of words in a source language
and a target language independent of the apparatuses that determine various ways in
which words may be arranged, or may move, say, within a sentence. Going below

1
For instance, the term “history” is inflected by the idea of “story” (histoire in French) and “lesson”
(geschichte in German), just as detail might mean both expansion and cutting down, in the English and
French meanings, respectively, showing how the impressions from different European languages fold into
a single word.
2
She goes on to point out that “the adjective ‘European,’ often assumed to refer to a common legacy of
Christendom, humanism, and Enlightenment principles, actually misrepresents the complexity of identi-
fying ‘Europe’ culturally and geopolitically at any given moment in history.”.

13
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

the level of the whole word, we might ask if particle may stand for a word that is
not uttered but understood to be there.3 As an experiment, we take here the case of
Sanskrit and Chinese in the hope that we might then return to re-engage the issues
posed by projects like Vocabulaire from a different vantage point.
As an opening gambit, here are three guiding questions we pose: First, if transla-
tion is a form of transport of meaning from one language (source) to another (tar-
get), does this movement bear any relation to movement of words, meanings, sense,
or reference, within a language? Second, does a movement of a word, or any one
component of it, from one location to another (be that within a word, within a sen-
tence, or from one language to another) constitute something new, or is it better seen
as an extension by actualizing a potential already contained in the different compo-
nents? The matter goes far beyond the operations of combinatory possibilities or
substitutions on syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes as in structuralist analysis, as
we hope to show. Finally, how is movement itself conceived in different languages,
asking for instance if it is both movement of/in the body and mind and how does
it register in the world? We try to approach these questions through a comparison
between Sanskrit and Chinese. Suspending for the moment the role of Europe as the
master mediator of theories of linguistic differences among different cultures, might
we recover something different from the vast archive of the commentarial traditions
of these languages?4
We are well aware of the risks of the kind of comparison we are proposing. In
a widely influential early text of comparative anthropology, von Humboldt (1999)
takes the difference between Chinese and Sanskrit to manifest the “most violent
contrast” known among natural languages, namely the most “extreme” opposition
between inflectional and morphological types, where one “consigns all grammati-
cal form of the language to the work of the mind,” he writes, the other “seeks to
incorporate it, even to the finest shadings, in the sound.” Because Chinese “marks
all grammatical form, in the widest sense, by position,” the connections of the sense
of the word call for “inner effort,” whereas in Sanskrit the “sense of the grammati-
cal form” and the “relationship to material meaning” are put into the sound. Rather
than assume the great divide between inflectional and morphological “types” or, for
that matter, assume that we already know what grammar means in each of these
traditions, our attempt will be to open up the category of grammar itself, first from
the side of Sanskrit (keeping its relation to the Prakrits in abeyance for purposes of
this paper)5 and then from the side of Chinese. We note here too that because Hum-
boldt includes Europe as the mediator between poles, he takes the settled nature of
the opposition between the inflectional and the morphological for granted, as if all
similarities and differences can be mapped on these master oppositions. Our point is

3
References to a suppressed element of a word might generally be discussed under ellipsis but takes dif-
ferent forms (see Filliozat, 1991).
4
This is of course an early concern of Chakrabarty’s (2009) in Provincializing Europe in his distinction
between History 1 and 2. But as Singh (2015) and others have shown, these are not merely exchanges
among local contexts, but taking a different perspective, we might wager that they were themselves deter-
minative of world histories.
5
See Ollett (2017) for a detailed exposition of the relation between Sanskrit and Prakrit.

13
 A. Brandel et al.

not that this kind of contrast between Sanskrit and Chinese does not serve any pur-
pose, but rather that we arrive at the differences through different routes. After all,
the differences in the way language was conceived in these traditions were subject
to mediations, since translation of Sanskrit texts into Chinese  took place, through
the efforts of those who traveled across the patchworks of kingdoms and empires,
universities, and monasteries since the beginning of the common era. Texts that
were available only as oral traditions were put into writing and in the course of these
activities it was not simply that texts were translated but ideas about grammar, poet-
ics, ritual, and much else moved across regions. Our point is not that the differences,
say between Indian and Chinese ways of understanding language are not important,
but that where the differences lie cannot be assumed to be known in advance—for
example in terms of the settled definitions of source vs. target languages, or of pres-
tige languages versus mere dialects. Let us see where this exercise might lead us or
where we might locate important blocks.

From the Side of Sanskrit

We start by readily admitting that what we discuss in this section is simply the clearing
of the ground for asking how the movement or transport of words, meanings, signifi-
cance, and contexts occurs within a language. After all, one cannot think of meaning
as transacted through words in just the same way cows are transacted through money
(Wittgenstein 2009a, b, 120)6 As Sandra Laugier points out brilliantly, the mystery of
the idea that meaning lies in use is that we learn words in certain contexts, but this
“learning” must allow us to project these words into new contexts that feel “right”
(Cavell, 1999; Laugier, 2009). This experience of “rightness” comes from our experi-
ences and agreements within a form of life and not from formally articulated rules and
practices of rule following, as all three of us have argued on different occasions (Bran-
del, 2021, 2023; Das, 2020). However, we hope to show that in the case of grammar
in Sanskrit, it is the very picture of rule that is at stake. One might even suggest that
this picture of a grammatical rule comes closer to Wittgenstein’s notion of “philosophi-
cal grammar,” which tells us the kind of object something is as we work out what is
similar or same, and what is different, on the basis of an agreement in the forms of life
we inhabit. The conceptual apparatus of grammar is a sophisticated one, but one of
the assumptions it makes is that the way ordinary people use expressions is of utmost
relevance for grammar and that common sense provides the bedrock on which expert
knowledge is constructed.
We might begin then with a philosophical story pertaining to the “infamous sec-
ond chapter” of Nagarjuna’s mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Siderits & Katsura, 2013). In
the second verse, Nagarjuna makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that the road
that is being traveled now is not being traveled at present. There would obviously be

6
Here is the relevant text in Wittgenstein: “You say: the point isn’t the word, but its meaning, and you
think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here
the word, there the meaning. The money, and the cow that you can buy with it.”.

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

no difficulty in saying that the road that was traveled yesterday is not being traveled
now; or that the road that will be traveled tomorrow is not being traveled now.7 But
if you are traveling on a road now, why is it not being traveled at present? Earlier
scholars were inclined to interpret this as another example of Zeno’s paradox. But in
a brilliant paper, Bhattacharya (1985) argues that the paradox here regarding move-
ment has less to do with time and more to do with conceptual difficulties that arise
from the apparatus of the kãraka or the deep case. The problem for Nagarjuna is
not that the present moment has no ontological reality. Rather, the issue the verse
poses is what the road is or does in relation to movement? If the road is put in the
accusative case (which is an option), then one would have to assume that the fruit of
the action of movement is falling on the road, or that the traveler is not seeking his
desired destination (e.g., the village) but is seeking the road. So, there would have to
be a movement attributed to the road in addition to a movement in the person who is
traveling on the road. It would be as if the road were moving in addition to a person
who was moving on it. These problems arise in this sentence because of the use of
the accusative case (karma karaka), whereas if the locative case had been used such
difficulties would disappear.8
The point is that a straightforward translation of the paradox emanating from a
grammatical puzzle into a paradox about time has nothing to do with the meaning
of the word gati (movement) taken in isolation, and everything to do with the gram-
matical structure of the sentence in which we have to decipher whether the con-
text is one in which inanimate objects like the road are neutral locations of other’s
actions or are they themselves effected by the action, as the accusative case seems to
suggest? Behind what looks like a scholastic debate, there are lurking questions that
arise in the everyday about theories of action.
If initially grammar may have seemed like a surprising vantage point from which
to begin, we hope that it now seems congenial,9 since we understand grammar as
both—(a) the delineation of technical rules through which one might determine cor-
rect construction of words and sentences and (b) a conceptual apparatus that simul-
taneously determines the status of words and their respective functions in relation
to action, expressed through the relation that different kinds of words bear to each
other within a sentence. From here we take up Panini’s apparatus on the use of the

7
gatamna gamyate tāvad agatam naiva gamyate.
gatāgatavinirmuktam gamyamānam na gamyate.
8
The flavor of the argument may be gleaned from Bhattacharya’s writing and we give a short citation:
“Locus” (adhikarana) says Candrakirti: although grammatically the road that is being traveled (gamy-
amana) is, in the sentence gamyamānam gamyate, the “object”(karman), semantically it is the locus
(adhikarana) of the action of traveling, insofar as it holds the agent in whom inheres the action of trave-
ling denoted by the verbal root gam (the “locus,” adhikaraṇa, holds the action only indirectly by holding
either the agent or the object in which the action inheres). The impossibility of the sentence, the road
that is being traveled now is not being traveled at present, is a philosophical difficulty about motion and
agency, not about time (Bhattacharya, 1985: 10).
9
As always, there are dissident voices on the pleasures of studying grammar. Jayant Bhatt, writes in his
text Ny Nyāya Manjari (850–900 CE): “Caught in the grip of inauspicious stars, or cowardly, or pun-
ished by the king; cursed by the ancestors, may such a person perform the hard labor in the field of gram-
mar” (cited in Rishi, 2021, p. 33).

13
 A. Brandel et al.

grammatical case in the sutras on the kãrakas (translated as the grammatical case
for the moment, but literally, the capacity of a word to produce action) as developed
in his canonical text, the Aṣṭādhyāyī. Our contention is that the whole apparatus of
the kãraka shows the fallacy of assuming that the act of translation involves find-
ing equivalences between words in source language and target language. Instead,
we find that what matters is to convey the relations among words in a sentence, and
thus how meaning is conveyed depends as much on the kind of atmosphere that the
underlying grammar conveys as the meaning of the individual word. In the case of
the kãrakas, this entails an emphasis on action or doing10; in other cases, such as the
mechanisms of lopa (substitution), it might be the ability to hear the unvoiced (Fil-
liozat, 1991). But for now, we will focus on the kãrakas.
Since Sanskrit is an inflectional language, in order to be usable in a sentence, a
word must end with either a case-specific ending or a finite verb ending. Both these
qualities determine a particular feature of the sentence, viz., that there are several
types of relations among words in a sentence insofar as the presence of a word in
a sentence will determine the form that other words might take. This is a complex
issue and goes much beyond the question of combinatorial possibilities at the level
of syntagmatic axis and possibilities of substitution at the paradigmatic level, as
in structural linguistics. Let us then start by introducing the kãraka, unfortunately
translated as case (despite the many difficulties of this designation must be accepted
provisionally because it has become so firmly established through use).11 In their
astute discussion of the three terms kãraka, vibhakti, and samāsa (roughly the cases,
the specific case affixes to represent a particular case, and compound words), Joshi
and Roodbergen (1999) write that:
The term kãraka - not defined in the A (i.e. Panini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī; the word
literally means “doer” – is used in three senses: ( a ) a syntactic category, like
karana or kartṛ, as defined in the section P. 1. 24-55, ( b ) secondarily, any
dravya ‘non-linguistic item’, as referred to by language, which participates in
an action and helps to bring it about, and also secondarily, a word standing for
a dravya. In any case, the word “action " covers an event or a process attributed
to an inanimate agent also. (Joshi & Roodbergen, 1999:96).

10
On the status of the kãrakas, Matilal (1991) observes: “Obviously, they are neither ‘purely semantic’
nor ‘purely syntactic,’ as far as Panini’s own system of grammar is concerned. The kãrakas were intro-
duced, as far as I can see, as an expedient that would facilitate Panini’s own description of the Sanskrit
language in general, and would, in particular, mediate between the introduction of affixes in words and
the representation of certain semantic relations” (Matilal 264).We agree with Matilal that a hard bound-
ary between syntactic and semantic relations is not of much use in understanding Panini’s grammar, but
when he goes on to say that Panini is not interested in ontology and is only formalizing the actual speech
acts of ordinary people, he seems to understand ontology as the domain of philosophy with its own
specialized vocabulary and hence would disallow the idea that how people speak can carry in them the
traces of philosophical thinking. In contrast, consider Wittgenstein’s reading of concepts which he argues
needs to be made as humble as chairs and lamps which make the commerce of everyday life possible (see
Das, 2020).
11
We will return to this point later, but we wish to signal other ways of designating the kãraka, as for
instance in Parimal Patil (2009) who, coming from the side of logic (nyāya) rather than grammar, desig-
nates them brilliantly as event makers.

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

Helpful as this definition is, it may stand in need of some elaboration as to why
the category of kãraka in Panini ends up under different sections, ranging from
sutras in the section named kãraka, to the sutras on vibhakti (nominal or verbal
affixes), and to the sutras on samāsa (joining of two terms). In each case, the order
in which the kãraka are mentioned differs, which we think is no accident. In addi-
tion, we suggest that the difference between general rules for the use of a kãraka
and the optional rule are best thought of as contextual, rather than assuming that
the general rule refers to the primary meaning of a kãraka and the optional rule to
the secondary meaning. Second, although located within a deep reflection of what
constitutes action, the events in the world are seen for purposes of the theory as con-
stituted by and in the sentence’s meaning. The sentence is not reducible to a proposi-
tion the main values of which are truth or falsity, but rather demonstrates how the
relation between the words is to be determined in relation to action as embodied in
the verb. For instance, in kãraka theory, the genitive is not a kãraka, both because
it establishes a relation only with nominal words in the sentence (e.g., indicating
possession) and because those relations do not contribute to the accomplishment of
the action as indicated by the verb.12 If we take the sentence “He is cooking the
rice belonging to Caitra,” the genitive establishes a relationship between the rice and
Caitra but does not establish any relation to the verb pacati (cooking). In contrast
when being enumerated in the context of vibhakti, or the nominal affix, it is treated
at par with the other kãrakas since there the function of the nominal ending is to
give information about gender and number.13
The distinction between action as embodied in the verb as part of a sentence
and action as it takes place in the world is important to remember, as it is easy
to slip from one to the other. As an example, Matilal has argued that the genitive
could be treated as kãraka because it contributes to the accomplishment of the
action “indirectly,” for if, Matilal says, Caitra had withheld permission to give the
rice (since he is the owner), then there would have been no rice to cook in the first
place! It is evident here that for Panini the action is the action expressed by the
verb in the sentence—it is not what would constitute the conditions for accom-
plishing the action independent of its expression. Hence, the objections raised
by some opponents within the Indic traditions that the same word could be agent
or location, or that the same action (leaf falling from the tree) could be repre-
sented through different kãraka relations such as the ablative (apāna) indicating
separation and genitive (sambandha) indicating relations of possession is easily

12
Given the vast reservoir of the commentarial tradition, and especially the discussion on how limited
agentive capacities might be found in the kãrakas other than that of the kartā or agent, there are some
objections to the complete elision of the genitive case for claims to having some agentive capacity, but
the discussion does not bear any major consequences for our overall discussion.
13
The kãrakas designated by a name are as follows: kartā (agent), karma (object), karaṇa (instrument),
sampradāna (dative), apādāna (ablative), sambandha (genitive), adhikaraṇa (locative), and sambodhaṇa
(vocative). As we can see, the names with some particle of kṛi them indicates relation to action, whereas
the genitive simply means relation indicating belonging to, or in possession of. There is some contro-
versy in the literature as to whether the vocative is simply added from the outside but see Chakrabarti
(2013) for a brilliant exposition of its crucial role in the kãraka system.

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 A. Brandel et al.

answered by the grammarians, since it is the place of the word in the sentence in
relation to the verb that determines the shifts with the same word being treated
sometimes as kartā (agent) and sometimes as karaṇa (instrument), or in the case
of the same action (leaf falling from tree) sometimes the tree is treated as genitive
(sambandha) and at other times as ablative (apādāna). In the first case, the rela-
tion of the leaf to the tree is a general one, as trees normally have the property of
having leaves, while in the latter case the leaf is seen as separating from the tree,
but a falling leaf does not alter the general relation of tree to leaf.
In the discussion on vibhakti (lit. that which divides the stem or the root
from the affix), all case endings (vibhakti) at the level of the surface structure of
the sentence are simply enumerated as first (prathamā), second (dvitiyā), third
(tritiyā) etc. corresponding to case endings for agent, object, instrument, and so
on, but basically to facilitate information about number, gender, etc. However,
there are several occasions when the distinction between kãraka-vibhaktis and
non-kãraka vibhaktis is introduced but we simply note that distinction without
further discussion here since the generally a vibhakti affix is simply indicative of
gender, and number, of the nominal term to which it is added. Finally, while it is
true that word order is not necessary to determine the meaning of a sentence, as
is the case in the morphological languages (with some exceptions), there is a spe-
cific apparatus in Panini in which the prior presence of a particular verb form in
a sentence prohibits a kãraka from being directly indicated. This is the apparatus
of the abhihita (previously expressed) kãraka and anabhihita (unexpressed) cat-
egories and it is this apparatus which allows one to infer the agent even when the
vibhakti (affix) of the nominal word may indicate karaṇa or instrument as in the
case of the use of passive voice. In the Chinese case as we shall see later, since
the subject and the object are not directly indicated, there always remains the pos-
sibility for shifting them and thus changing the context through such shifts.
Consider the governing rule in Panini where the distinction between abhihita
and anabhihita is introduced to explain how the agent function is to be deter-
mined in a sentence. Joshi and Roodbergen (1999) explain this rule as follows:
“The basic rules are P. 2. 3. 1 and P. 2. 3. 46. The first rule is a section head-
ing rule valid up to P. 2. 3. 45. It says that the rules collected in this section
are applicable provided that the kãraka categories concerned are anabhi-
hita. It is this rule which introduces the distinction between abhihita and
anabhihita kãraka categories. The rule also implies that the same kãraka
relation is not to be expressed more than once in the same construction. The
second rule implies that the nominative endings are added after a nominal
stem to express abhihita kãrakaa categories. This is explicitly stated by an
alternative phrasing of P. 2. 3. 46, namely, as abhihite prathama the first (
case ending is added ) when ( the kãraka concerned ) has ( already ) been
expressed.... Thus P. 2. 3. 46 implies that the nominative endings do not
express a particular kãraka category. They merely serve to express gender
and number as connected with a nominal stem meaning, and they may show
syntactic agreement between a verb form and a krita- derivation.”

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

There are three important ideas that Joshi and Roodbergen provide here which
come from the grounding idea that when interpreted through the kãrakas a sentence
cannot yield two different meanings. For instance, we cannot say that Devadatta is
both the instrument and the agent in the act of cooking. But to work this out fully, first
we need to unpack in greater detail what the abhihita/anabhihita distinction achieves.
Consider the injunctions. First is the rule that the same kãraka relation is not to
be expressed more than once in the same construction. This means that if the finite
verb affix has already expressed who is the agent of the sentence, or the object of
the sentence, then we do not apply any other rules to determine these categories.
However, note that this abhihita relation can only apply to the nominative for agent
or for object (in the case of passive construction). As far as the other kãraka catego-
ries are concerned, they cannot be understood through the conjugation of the verb.
To explain this further, look at the rule abhihite prathamã—the first case ending is
added to indicate gender and number if the kãraka has already been expressed. The
requirement that the two must be in agreement gives priority to the verb ending and
not the nominative case ending. It is only within the anabhihita category (i.e., previ-
ously unexpressed) that the kãraka rules will kick into determining the status of the
word as agent or object.
Take the sentence devadattah odanam pacati (Devadatta is cooking the rice).
The finite verb affix is giving us information about gender (male) number (singular),
while the verb places the action of cooking in the present. The question becomes
more complicated when we ask if the status of Devaddatta in the sentence as kartā
(agent) is expressed through the vibhakti (the suffix particle) or if it derives from the
logic of kãraka or word as event maker. An alternative expression in the passive for
would be odanah devadattena pachyate (the rice is being cooked by Devadatta) in
which case we might ask is Devadatta the instrument through which rice is being
cooked or the agent of this act?14 In this case, as we have already indicated, the
nominative case ending (prathamã) does not indicate the kãraka, for the rice cannot
be held to have the agentive capacity to cook itself.
We will consider the debates on how other cases such as instrumental or dative
might for some purpose take on the role of the kartā or agentive case. Here we sim-
ply state that action here means action as expressed through the verb, although given
the astonishing variety and complexity of different verbs, the optional rules will give
different inflections with regard to the kind of capacities other kãrakas come to dis-
play with regard to the verb. Thus, there is a fundamental distinction in Panini in
the relation between nominal words and verbs within a sentence on the one hand,
and the semantic relations among words not directly related to the verb on the other.
Since it is not feasible to discuss each kãraka within the limits of a single paper,
we will illustrate the issues that arise in considering how layers of meaning get
attached to the way kãrakas function as event makers in a sentence with the help

14
Gonda (1951) had already noted in his book on the passive voice that the passive is often used to
indicate impersonal actions and that not all verbs lend themselves to be conjugated in the passive voice.
However, all verbs are classified as either conjugated in the ãtmanepada (middle voice) or parasmai pada
(active voice), though some verbs may be conjugated in either depending upon the context.

13
 A. Brandel et al.

of the agentive case. It is important to remember that the layers of meaning we are
referring to are at least in part a result of the fact that kãraka theory played a singu-
larly important role in more than grammar. Karkas are also essential in mimāmsā
(ritual theory) and logic (nyāya), in addition to the way they inflect meanings in
everyday talk though each domain interprets the relation to the verb somewhat dif-
ferently, emphasizing action, production of something new, or for the moment, we
will let the following paragraph from Renou on the embedding of grammatical rela-
tions into ritual as well as the significance of indicating the vibhaktis only by ordinal
numbers but endowing the kãrakas with separate names stand for the nuances in the
argument:
“The grammatical cases (referring to vibhaktis –author note) do not bear any
designations: they are mentioned by numerical indices, prathamā, etc.. This
manner of designation must have come from ritual where a host of notions
(days, rites, musical modes, etc.) was evoked by the ordinals. On the other
hand, the functions that indicate the cases in their relation with the verbal pro-
cess, the kãrakas (strictly, that which effectuates a verbal action) bear names
of strongly individualized aspects, among which the most important is a group
derived from the root kṛ - : karmaṇ, karaṇa, kartṛ, adhikaraṇa. Karmaṇ,
"action" (equally, direct object, the object of the transitive verb) belongs to
the rituals where the word, since the Ṛg Veda, denotes the act par excellence,
that is, rite. Similarly, kartṛ which in both the domains is the ‘agent’. Karaṇa,
according to the common use should be a more general equivalent of karman:
‘act’ in the mantra, ‘fact of performing’ in prose; whereas the grammatical
use in the sense of a ‘(notion of) instrument’ comes from the fact that several
nouns with -ana suffix carry an instrumental value…. (Renou, 1969)

Kartā, the Doer, and the Nominative

What we hope to do in this section is to show the complexity of the grammati-

cal agent in the sections on kãraka (event makers) in the cycle of the kãrakas in
Aṣṭādhyāyī that begins with the apādan (ablative) and ends with kartā (agent).
According to a famous sutra of Panini that gives the definition of kartā (P. 1. 4./54)
svatantrah kartā, the agent is unconstrained. Here are two examples: rāmah gachati
(Rama is going) and rāmena gamyate (rāma’s going is happening). Rāma is the
agent because the sentence is around the action of going and the action is accom-
plished by Rāma. In the first example, Rāma is indicated by the conjugation of the
verb (gachati) and the first case affix (prathamā vibhakti) is added for agreement
between verb and noun. Since the verb already indicates the kartā as Rāma, we can
deduce that according to the Panian apparatus of abhihita–anabhihita, the status of
Rāma as kartā is abhihita—that is to say, it is already expressed in the sentence. In
the second example, Rāma is declined in the instrumental case—the action has been
accomplished by Rāma, but his status as kartā is anabhihita, unexpressed by the
verb (dhātu) in the sentence. This immediately draws our attention to the fact that a
certain attribution of agentive aspect could be found in the other kãrakas such as the
instrumental, the dative, the ablative, and the locational.

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

In his commentary on this sūtra, Patanjali in the Mahabhashya expands the mean-
ing of svatantra in the following manner. The term tantra (literally thread) is best
interpreted in this instance in its secondary meanings of expansion and dominance.15
Patanjali argues that here the sutra is referring to the dominance of the kartā relative
to all other kãrakas (tadyah prādhānye vartate tantra śabdah tasyedam grahaṇam,
lit. indicates its dominance (its being most prominent)), and the word tantra should
be taken in this sense. Explaining this notion of dominance, Rishi (2021) explains
that the action indicated by the verb in the sentence is accomplished through the
joint work of the different kãrakas—so they have some agentive capacities, but these
capacities are seen as contained in the general capacity of the kartā to accomplish
the whole action and not merely one component of it. The agentive capacities of
other kãrakas manifest themselves when the kartā is not present in the sentence.
We can see how different actions are joined in a kartā through another exam-
ple. The action of cooking (pacati) consists of a sequence of actions, each of which
might be indicated by a nominal term. The following is the commonly agreed
division into actions that can then be collected together to constitute the action of
cooking:
adhiśhrayaṇa—putting the vessel on the fuel
udkaāsechana—irrigating the vessel with water
taṇdulavāpana—placing rice grains into the vessel
edhoapakarṣana—removing the coals or burning pieces of wood and letting
the fire be extinguished
The verb pacati (cooks) in Devadaṭṭah odanam pacati does not rule out that oth-
ers might have performed the other micro actions necessary to accomplish the act
of cooking though it is always possible to make other sentences to highlight the
other actions, such as putting the rice in the vessel, adding water, or extinguishing
the fire after the rice is softened. In such cases, the agentive capacity hidden under
the helper role of other kãrakas becomes manifested though there is a delicate bal-
ance on how to keep the specificity of the capacity that inheres in different kãrakas
under their specific names and functions (thus the function of separation in the abla-
tive case, or that of the means for accomplishing an action in the instrumental case)
while also making the agentive capacity of these different kãrakas evident.16 The
following examples might help in clarifying this issue further.

15
If we took its primary meaning of tantra here in the sense of stretching the thread, it would lead to the
absurdity that the rule applied only to the weaver. In the legal context, the kartā could be interpreted in
the sense of expansion since as the custodian of the ancestral property on behalf of all agnates including
the unborn, he is representative of all agnates and may act on their behalf.
16
Bhatta (1988–1989) points to Patanjali’s distinction between primary agent and secondary ones. He
(Patanjali) observes that when a primary agent is present along with the non-primarily or secondary
agents, the latter are dependent in their function of accomplishing the action on the former. There is a
fascinating discussion on such sentences as “the wood cooks” and whether this implies that objects might
be considered as themselves agentive in that it is the power inherent in them that is relevant, or whether
in itself that power is simply a potential.

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The first example is from sentences that are sometimes used in common speech
to indicate cooking by investing agency in the cooking vessel, sthālī pacati—i.e., the
vessel cooks. Here the question is why the vessel, instead of being indicated through
the vibhakti for the locative case (saptamī, the seventh case ending), is being indi-
cated by the use of the first case ending (prathamā), normally used for the agentive
case. Does it signal special case? The answer is that indeed, such usage implicitly
refers to a context where a large quantity of the food is being cooked. For example,
one might also say, dronam pacati—a measure of five sera cooks17—the implied
meaning is to give some agentive credit to the vessel that has carried such a huge
weight within itself. Or in the case of agentive capacity being shown in the instru-
mental case, one could say, edhah pacanti—fire woods are cooking. What is implied
in the shift in the firewood seen as the instrument, the means for the act of cooking,
to firewood seen as the agent of cooking? The assumption here is that the fire knows
how to keep burning till the rice is cooked. (The act of extinguishing the fire on
completion of the cooking is included in the act of cooking itself.) Thus, in the sen-
tence edhah pacanti, something of the agentive capacity of firewood is recognized
in the fact that Devadatta is not the one who keeps the fire burning during the cook-
ing, though his being the agent of the act of cooking is not extinguished. An interest-
ing challenge for any translation project in these circumstances is to find a way of
signaling these distributive agentive capacities. In Hindi, one often says handi pak
rahi hai (the pot is cooking) after the actions of stirring and adding of spices and
ensuring that the heat of the fire is just right have been completed and the vessel
takes over as not only what contains the food but also what “cooks” it; the firewood
takes over the task of providing consistent heat to the vessel in which rice is being
cooked. Hence, the independence or dominance of Devadatta as agent is not extin-
guished but is made more modest. Sanskrit grammar does not invent new words like
actants to signify the agentive capacities of both people and things. But it does show
a nuanced understanding of the relational aspects of these different agentive capaci-
ties that the sentence as a whole based on popular usage brings into being.
A final observation on cooking might be worth stating. In his commentary on
such formations as the vessel is cooking, Patanjali is mindful that the vessel does not
lose its capacity of containing the amount of grain to be cooked, so one might say
that when the dominant, artā (Devadatta), is present, the vessel becomes depend-
ent; a locus, when Devadatta is absent. There is an agentive aspect in the vessel that
becomes manifested.

The Optional Rules and Their Poetic Potential

The architecture of Panini’s rules includes not only general rules and governing
definitions of grammatical objects of kãrakas and vibhaktis, but also optional rules
that might be thought of in terms of the way they modify a kãraka in relation to
specific verbs. We can demonstrate this kind of movement and how its potential is

17
Sera, pāva, were measures traditionally used to measure grain, vegetables, etc.

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

harnessed within poetry with a short example from the excellent work done by the
Japanese scholar Yoko Kawamura (2018) on a seventh century poetic composition
Bhatṭikāvya (also known as Rāvanavadha, The Killing of Rāvaṇa). This text was
composed by the poet Bhatṭi to illustrate rules of Panini’s grammar for the educa-
tion of a prince.18 We can take examples to make the point that the exercise of an
option of a grammatical provision introduces a shift in how we might experience a
character in the well-known story of the princess Sitā’s abduction by Rāvaṇa in the
epic, Ramayana, and the subsequent war waged by Rāma in which Rāvaṇa is killed.
Since this is a poem used to illustrate rules of grammar, it allows Bhaṭṭi to com-
pose original poems that are inserted within the scenes taken from the original poem
composed by the poet Vālmīki.
We indicated briefly in an earlier section that there are special conditions under
which a noun can be indicated by a kãraka ending that seems to deviate from its
original characterization, thus for instance moving from the ablative to the geni-
tive to indicate a leaf falling from the tree. Kawamura takes the following verse
from Bhatṭikāvya (8.78) in which Rāvaṇa is trying to seduce Sitā and he (Naka-
mura) shows the shifts between the instrumental (the karaṇa kãraka) and the dative
(sampradāṇa) within the verse. This demonstration is indeed erudite, but more stun-
ning are the consequences for the creation of a new tonality in the experience of the
listener that touches on Rāvaṇa’s character:
iccha snehena diīvyantī viṣayān bhuvenesvaram
sambhogāya parikritah kartāsmi tava nāpriyam
You have gambled lovingly with objects pleasing to the senses — now with
(the same) loving affection accept the lord of the world (referring to himself).
Enslaved by my desire for you, I will never do what displeases you.19
There are two expressions in the first line, one takes the general rule for the use of
the instrumental case in the word snehena (lovingly, using desire as the means) and
a second that uses an optional rule for the use of the accusative case instead of the
instrumental one for viṣayān (sensuous objects). In the second line of the verse, the
use of the dative case for sambhogāya (sexual pleasure) instead of the instrumental
(sambhogeṇa) is illustrated and these small shifts introduce a different tonality in
the character of Rāvaṇa even though neither the plot changes nor is his villainy in
abducting Sītā completely washed off.
The general rule for the use of the instrumental case in Panini (1.4.42) is
“sādhakatamṅ karaṇam”—that kãraka which serves the most to bring about an
action is called karaṇam. The simplest example is the use of as object such as “cut-
ting with an axe” (paraśuseṇa chinatti). In the first line, snehena (with affection)

18
Shastric objects (one name for expert generated concepts) were often illustrated through poetic or dra-
matic compositions to make them easier to comprehend in an enjoyable way.
19
This translation of the verse differs in small ways from that of Kawamura but has no impact on the
ways the kãraka endings are used in three of the words in the verse through which he offers the illustra-
tion of the kãraka rules.

13
 A. Brandel et al.

uses the general rule but obviously extends the idea of the instrument to imply that
Sītā is being invited to direct the desire she has felt for objects of the senses that
pleased her to now accept Rāvaṇa as her lover—the means through which he wants
true possession of her (after all she is already his captive) is her loving acceptance
and not the force with which he can take her body. However, it is important to regis-
ter that in the phrase, diīvyantī viṣayān, the term viṣayān (referring to what pleases
the senses) has been put in the accusative following an optional rule (1.4.43) that
states divah karma ca, viz., literally in the case the verb div (gamble, play), the use
of karma (accusative) is an additional option.20 As Kawamura expands it: “that
kãraka which serves as means ( sādhakatma) relative to the action denoted by the
work div ‘gamble, play’ is called karman in addition to karaṇa.”
Here is where one can see that the objects pleasing the senses might be seen as
means through which desire finds expression, but Bhatti deftly takes the option to the
use the accusative and thus evokes the tonality of the karman, objects (usually) defined
as those most desired by the kartā, the agent of the sentence. On another reading,
karma, or object, might be defined as that on whom the actions of the agent bear con-
sequences.21 The shadow of this kãraka, then, falls on the exhortation to Sītā to accept
him, or rather to accept her desire for him, as she accepts the desire for objects pleas-
ing to the senses with which she plays, or rather, gambles. The verb gamble is particu-
larly telling for it alerts us to the possibility that Sītā is not simply the dutybound wife
of Rama but one who can recognize the desire for (sexual) play in herself.
What kind of agency is portrayed in Rāvaṇa’s speech? The phrase in the second
line of the verse, sambhogaya parikritah, again could have used the instrumental
case for sambhoga (sexual pleasure) in that the desire for sexual pleasure might
have been portrayed as the means by which Rāvaṇa fulfills his longing for Sītā. But
the optional use of the dative shows him to have become enslaved (the parikritah
indicating his bondage). In some versions, the term is rendered more directly as
dasikrta (been made into a servant). The relevant rule in Panini is 1.4.44, which
says “prikrayane sampradānam anyatrasy ā m”—in the case of the verb for hiring,
the kãraka which serves as the means for hiring is optionally called sampradāna
(dative). There are several examples that Kawamura gives from other texts (e.g.,
Kasikavritti) that show that payment received for doing an action such as teaching
binds the recipient to the necessity of fulfilling the act. Rāvaṇa is showing himself to
be captive to Sītā, as a hireling would be, though physically it is Sītā who is captive
to him. Does this change the story? No, but it shows how we might consider Rāvaṇa
ever so briefly, as a tender lover.
One could go through the entire list of the kãrakas as they are deployed in the
Bhṭṭikāvya to show how different potentials of words are released but we hope that
the point is sufficiently clear. In the act of “illustrating” the use of grammatical rules

20
Let us not miss the importance of the diminutive ca, the particle for addition—the presence of this
particle indicates an option but we cannot take up the weight different words for indicating options carry
which are subject of much debate.
21
We note the three ways in which the object is affected by the agent in the sentence—through creation
of something new, through modification, and through reaching a place.

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

enunciated in the Panini’s scheme, the use of optional rules becomes particularly
salient in poetics (and especially for the kãrakas) for these usages might not alter the
plot or the characters but they add a different tonality, different shades, so that even
within a stable understanding of the text, our experience of particular characters or
scenes acquires a new dimension and hence a different sense of depth.
In the next section, we move to the Chinese case, but it might be helpful to
recount the main points we have made with regard to Sanskrit. First, we have argued
that the kãraka system seen in terms of the event makers in a sentence shows the
dominance of the verb defined as action and all other words receive their definitions
as kãraka relative to the accomplishment of the action indicated by the verb. Sec-
ond, any composite action (e.g., cooking) can be broken into its component parts.
And while the agentive action may be dominant in that without the agent the action
would not exist at all, subsequent words with other functions as of being instru-
ments, or indirect objects or location, for instance, are acknowledged as “helpers” in
the accomplishment of the action and sometimes acquire agentive capacities. Third,
although the word order is not strictly designated, the abhihita-anabhihita appara-
tus in the theory of kãrakas which states that the kãraka once expressed through
the means of the verb cannot be expressed again in a sentence means that the verb
deployed in this way can affect the interpretation of the meaning of subsequent
words as regards their kãraka status. Fourth, the device of options through which a
word might move from, say, indicating an instrumental function to that of an indirect
object as in the dative, or of the dative sometimes taking on an agentive function, is
deployed in the region of poetry to make slight shifts in our experience of a text or
well-known legend by introducing a different angle with which to view a character
or a scene. Finally, we have focused the apparatus of the kãrakas through which
movements of meaning happen within a sentence but there are many other ways in
which such movements can be conveyed including the composing and decomposing
of samāsas (composite words), use of particles to suggest something for which the
use of an explicit word would be inappropriate, or in the case of dramas that typi-
cally use both Sanskrit and Prakrit, the play with grammar and prosody to gather the
potentials of both languages together to enlarge the experience of a text. There is,
then, nothing special about translation and the whole plethora of questions regarding
fidelity or authenticity, once we accept that movements, concealing and revealing of
possibilities, commentaries, and use of multiple languages might be the normal state
of affairs in many contexts. The devices through which one enters these questions
might vary but the fact that for centuries people have used multiple experiences of
translation and commentaries, to move within and across languages is evident. As
Wittgenstein would (perhaps) say, let us not add false excitement to it.

From the Side of Chinese

Let us now turn to classical Chinese. As with Sanskrit, we will begin by discussing
theorizations of movement, and from there move on to see how these theorizations
play out in the movements that we can categorize as commentary and translation.

13
 A. Brandel et al.

A key term in classical Chinese discussions is that of “patterns.” The English

word “pattern” covers a number of distinct terms in classical Chinese, so we will
have to nuance our associations and understandings of the term as we go.
But let us lay out a general argument from which we can then build our more
nuanced understandings. To the untrained human eye, the world appears as a myriad
and random complexity. But, to the trained eye, the seemingly random complexity
falls into patterns of relationships. As we can learn to see this, we can cease to sim-
ply play out these patterns and instead begin to alter the patterns and thus open up
new possibilities. Theories of language develop out of this framework.

Working with Patterns

To get a sense of the ways these theories work, let us turn to Xu Shen, a figure from
the first century. In the postface to his Shuowen jiezi, Xu Shen lays out a theory
of language based upon a narrative of the origin of characters.22 Tracing his argu-
ment will allow us to delve into the complexity of some of the terms and theories
from China and track the different ways in which we find action and expression are
brought into the framework of the sentence than what we saw in the last section
from the side of Sanskrit.
We begin in distant antiquity:
古者庖犧氏之王天下也
In ancient times, when Baoxi [Fuxi] ruled all under Heaven,
仰則觀象於天
he looked up and observed the images in Heaven,
俯則觀法於地
and looked down and observed the models on Earth.
觀鳥獸之文
He observed the patterns of the birds and beasts
與地之宜
and the ways these fit with the earth.
近取諸身
Near at hand he took from his body,
遠取諸物
and at a distance he took from things.
於是始作易八卦
He thereupon first raised up the eight trigrams
以垂憲象
in order to display the exemplary images. Xu (1815: 15a.1)
Fu Xi was an ancient sage. He was able see the world not simply in terms of a
random set of activities but rather as a series of patterns—the ways the tracks of

22
See the excellent discussion by Françoise Bottéro (2002).

13
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

birds and beasts fit with the shifts of the landscape and the ways his body moved
with the workings of the objects around him.
From this, Fu Xi raised up a series of lines, arranged into trigrams—images
of three lines, with some lines being unbroken and others broken. The trigrams
were simply a refinement of the patterns playing out in the world. And the shift-
ing of the broken and unbroken lines from one trigram to another gave a refined
understanding of the patterns playing out in the world at large. Such patterns are
usually too complex for humans to understand, but the refined version found in
the sequences of trigrams allowed humans to see and navigate the world.
This in turn allowed humans to begin to open up new possibilities of acting in
the world. This opening up of new possibilities is explicated by Xu Shen through
a continuation of his reading of history.
Although trigrams have been generated, the work of governance was still
restricted in this distant past to the use of knotted cords to keep records. Such
a method was utterly incapable of keeping track of the proliferating activities of
humanity.
及神農氏
When it came to the time of Shen Nong,
結繩為治
they tied cords into knots to maintain order
而統其事
and organize their undertakings.
庶業其繁
The various enterprises proliferated
飾偽萌生
and endless artifice was generated. (Xu, 1815: 15a.1a-1b.)
The next ruler was the Yellow Emperor, the figure widely credited at the time
with creating the first successful state. One of the Yellow Emperors ministers was
a figure named Cang Jie—the figure Xu Shen credits with the creation of writing:
黃帝史官倉頡
Cang Jie, the scribe of the Yellow Emperor,
見鳥獸蹄迒之跡
saw the traces of the hooves and feet of the birds and beasts
知分理可相別異也
and understood that they could be distinguished by sorting out the lines.
初造書契
He thus first invented written tallies.
百工以乂
The various workers were thereby regulated,
萬品以察
and their myriad products were thereby inspected.
蓋取諸夬
He took this from the hexagram Guai. (Xu, 1815: 15a.1b)

13
 A. Brandel et al.

Cang Jie followed the technique of Fuxi. Looking at the traces left on the ground
by the birds and beasts, Cang Jie began the work of sorting out the different types
of broken and unbroken lines refined before by Fuxi. Cang Jie was inspired by the
hexagram Guai, which was created by putting two trigrams together into a single
six-line image. Guai has one broken line and five unbroken lines—a refined pattern
that inspired Cang Jie to invent the use of tallies to mark and order the activities of
workers.
Cang Jie next created writing itself:
倉頡之初作書也
When Cang Jie first created writing,
蓋依類象形
he relied on the categories, images, and forms.
故謂之文
This is why they are called “patterns.”
其後形聲相益
Afterward, the forms and sounds were added to each other.
即謂之字
These are called “characters.” (Xu, 1815: 15a.1b)
Cang Jie invented writing by focusing on the categories, images, and forms
refined by Fuxi. These together are all “patterns.” Once the basic set of patterns
were worked out, Cang Jie linked the forms to specific sounds that humans make.
This linking of forms to sounds he called “characters.”
Although there are a restricted set of patterns, these can be endlessly developed in
permutations into a proliferating number of characters:
文者
As for the “patterns”:
物象之本
they are the basis of the images of things.
字者
As for the “characters”:
言孳乳而寖多也
they involve an endless growth and proliferation. (Xu, 1815: 15a.1b-2a)
Characters are generated by sets of patterns. These patterns were inspired by the
images in the heavens and marked by the lines inspired by the traces of the birds and
beasts. Once developed into characters, however, an endless growth and prolifera-
tion becomes possible.
This proliferation of characters opens the possibility of writing. Writing is the
placement of characters in relation to each other. These relationships between the
characters open up yet more possibilities:
著於竹帛謂之書
Recording on bamboo and silk is called “writing.”
書者如也
Writing is the opening of possibility. (Xu, 1815: 15a.2a)

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

The characters are themselves built upon patterns in the world, and the relation-
ships between the characterrs open new possibilities of meaning.
Our translation of 如 as “opening of possibility” requires a slight pause. The term
itself translates literally as “as if”—the same term that plays a significant role in
Chinese ritual theory as well (Puett, 2014). The sense, as we have seen, is that the
world consists of patterns. By working with these patterns, altering their relation-
ships, new possibilities can endlessly be teased out.
For Xu Shen, divination, ritual, and writing all emerge from this same kind of
work that humans do. Divination is about seeing the trajectories that existing pat-
terns are creating and learning to act in ways that navigate those trajectories. The
trigrams are what make that work possible. Ritual is about taking existing patterns
among relationships and altering those relationships through endless substitutions,
placements of figures in different positions, and role reversals. Writing is about
altering these patterns through the endless re-working of the relationships between
characters.
We may think that divination tells one what the future holds; ritual tells one what
to do; language represents the world. Or moving to a register we will be discussing
momentarily, commentary tells the reader what a poem or statement means. But, for
Xu Shen, all of these activities are on the contrary different versions of working with
patterns and opening up possibilities.
From this point of view, translation is simply another such activity: moving sets
of relations into new registers to alter the relations and open possibilities. Commen-
tary and translation are sets of activities directly related to ritual, divination, and
even to the basic act of writing.
With this opening theorization and set of terms, let us explore what this would
mean in practice. We will begin with the work of interpretation seen in the commen-
tarial tradition. We will explore the ways these possibilities of meaning play out and
seek to explicate what is at stake in this interpretive work.
Let us turn to the first poem in the Book of Songs, the “Guan ju” 關雎. The Book
of Songs is a collection of poems from antiquity, purportedly collected by Confucius.
I will begin with a very rough translation of the poem:
關關雎鳩
“Guan, guan,” cry the fishhawks
在河之洲
On the isle in the river.
窈窕淑女
How modest is this lady,
君子好逑
For the lord a good match.
參差荇菜
Joining and separating are the water grasses
左右流之
Flowing to the left and right.
窈窕淑女
How modest is this lady,

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寤寐求之
Waking from sleep, seeking her.
求之不得
Seeking her, but not obtaining
寤寐思服
Waking from sleep, thinking of her.
悠哉悠哉
Longing, longing,
輾轉反側
Tossing, turning, rolling to his side.
參差荇菜
Joining and separating are the water grasses
左右采之
Gathering them from the left and right.
窈窕淑女
How modest is this lady,
琴瑟友之
The qin and se zithers connect them.
參差荇菜
Joining and separating are the water grasses
左右毛之
Working it from the left and right.
窈窕淑女
How modest is this lady,
鐘鼓樂之
The bells and drums bring them joy. (Maoshi zhengyi毛詩正義, 12a-13a)
The poem would appear to deal with the emotions of a separated male and
female. Perhaps they are lovers, separated from each other by distance or social
restraints. Or perhaps the focus of the poem is the prince, who hopes to marry a
shy or heSītā nt maiden. The image of fishhawks calling to each other serves as a
poignant contrast to the separation of the prince and the maiden, as does the water-
grass. Either the music is still allowing them to connect with each other through
a shared resonance, or perhaps the music is a reference to the prince’s courtship.
Already we are beginning to sense the ambiguities that make the poem work. But only
the beginning. Here let us explain some aspects of classical Chinese that will be important
for the work of interpretation we will be discussing. Classical Chinese does not require
that verb tense be marked, nor does it require one to mark who is the subject or object of
an action, or what the gender or number of the subject or object is. Any of these can of
course be marked if a writer or interpreter wants to make them clear. But, since they do
not have to be marked, it means that a poem that leaves these issues ambiguous can be
interpreted by endlessly altering the subjects of actions, the moment when actions did or
will take place, etc. In the terminology introduced above, altering the relations of the char-
acters, themselves based upon patterns, opens up new possibilities.
In our translation above, English requires one to use gender, number, and tense
markers. We accordingly already closed off several of the possibilities that the

13
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

poem leaves open, to return to the opening line. A literal word for word transla-
tion would render:
關關雎鳩
Guan guan fishhawk
We chose in our translation above to render the fishhawk plural, to give a sense
of the fishhawks calling to each other. But there is nothing in the Chinese that
requires this. We also added the verb “cry” (resisting the temptation to use a more
plaintive verb), but the line does not provide a verb at all.
And what about the references to music? In our translation, I rendered the first
reference as:
琴瑟友之
The qin and se zithers connect them.
And the second:
鐘鼓樂之
The bells and drums bring them joy. (Maoshi zhengyi毛詩正義, 12a-13a)
In both cases, we have rendered the object marker zhi 之as “them.” The line
could thus refer to music that connects the lovers despite their separation, as the
fishhawks call to each other to connect themselves as well. But the zhi 之 can also
be singular, and of any gender. So it could be “her.” And we have read the musi-
cal instruments as the subject of the lines, but the subject could be an implicit
“he” (the prince): “With qin and se zithers, he connects with her.” Or an implicit
“we”—another subject altogether—using music to connect them (the prince and
maiden): “With qin and se zithers, we connect them.”
But who would the “we” be? Two lines before, there is a reference to the gath-
ering of water grasses. Perhaps this is the maiden gathering water grasses, and the
prince is able to see her but not be with her. Or perhaps there is already a “we”
gathering the water grasses. In other words, narrators in the water, gathering the
grasses, seeing the fishhawks calling to each other, and seeing as well the lovers
who are not able to reach each other. “We” then use music to connect the lovers,
as the fishhawk calls do to each other.
All of these are grammatically possible ways of reading the lines. But the com-
mentarial tradition opens up far more possibilities for interpretation than we have
explored thus far. To begin with, we have so far kept the poem in the present
tense. We have also left the identity of the prince and the maiden ambiguous, and
we have allowed the relationship between them to be a matter of speculation. But
all of this can easily be marked as well.
Let us explore some of these readings. To help remind ourselves of the spare-
ness of the classical Chinese, let us return to the first stanza with a word-for-word
translation. We can then explore the different ways these lines are interpreted in
the commentarial tradition. We will here use present tense and singular markers
for the exercise.

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關關雎鳩
Guan guan fishhawk
在河之洲
On river’s isle
窈窕淑女
Modest modest this female,
君子好逑
Lord good match. (Maoshi zhengyi毛詩正義, 12a)
One of the most influential commentaries to the poem was the Mao commentary,
written in the last centuries before the common era (Guan Ju,  1965: 12a.).23 The
Mao commentary reads the poem in the past tense. More specifically, the commen-
tary dates the poem to the reign of King Wen, the ruler who received the mandate to
begin the Zhou dynasty in the eleventh century BCE. The subjects of the poem are
also identified: the prince is King Wen himself, and the female is his consort.
The opening lines refer to fishhawks—in the plural—and more specifically to
male and female fishhawks separated yet crying out to each other. (This is the way
we were interpreting the opening line above as well, but it is important to note that
this is an interpretation: the Chinese does not mark the fishhawk as either singular or
plural.) To translate:
關關雎鳩
“Guan guan” the separated male and female fishhawks call to each other
在河之洲
On the island in the river. (Maoshi zhengyi毛詩正義, 12a)
The next two lines refer to King Wen and his consort, also separated:
窈窕淑女
How elegant is King Wen’s consort,
君子好逑
A perfect match for King Wen. (Ibid.)
Since the reading changes the mood of the entire poem, we have offered slightly
different translations of the descriptor characters as well. In our initial interpreta-
tion, the fishhawks calling out to each other was offered as a poignant contrast to the
male and female humans, who are separated and unable to call to each other. The
subsequent stanzas reflect this poignancy, with the male tossing and turning, unable
to sleep.
In the Mao commentary, however, the king and his consort are married. Moreo-
ver, the queen is the focus of the poem. The separation of King Wen and the queen
is read as the consort intentionally withdrawing to let King Wen focus on his work.
The separation maintains the order of the court and allows King Wen’s transforming

23
For a superb overview of commentarial readings of the “Guan ju” poem, see Yu (1983). For a discus-
sion of interpretations of the poem prior to the Mao commentary, see Riegel (1997).

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

influence to spread. The queen is the one who picks the water grasses, and she does
so for the ancestral sacrifices (Ibid. 11a–13a).
Zheng Xuan (127–200) on the contrary reads the lady in the poem as a reference
not to the queen of King Wen but rather to the ladies of the court. The queen is seek-
ing mates for them, and it is the queen who is tossing and turning in her inability
thus far to find good mates (Ibid. 12a–13a). Zhu Xi (1130–1200) will later read the
poem as actually having been composed by the ladies of the court, shifting the entire
poem into a different perspective. (Zhu, 1958. 1–2).
What is going on here? Xu Shen’s terminology points toward a way of explicat-
ing what we have seen in practice. The work of commentary involves a constant re-
working of the lines by shifting the speakers, the tense, and the context to bring out
an endless array of possibilities. This is the work of commentary. But, for Xu Shen,
it is also the work of opening possibilities.

Translation

From this point of view, commentary and translation are directly inter-related. Both
involve moving a body of material into a new register and re-reading it accordingly.
It will accordingly be helpful, as we shift to activities that would more naturally fall
under a category of translation, to situate these activities within yet another body of
commentaries.
As one might imagine, given the visions of patterning that have just been dis-
cussed, much of the writing from early China consist of endless re-readings and re-
framings of earlier stories, anecdotes, and sayings. But the exception is perhaps most
telling in this regard. The Laozi is a text that at first glance seems to be placing itself
in opposition to much of this commentarial work. Unlike virtually all other texts
from the early period, the Laozi contains no references to other texts, no allusions
to earlier materials, and no references to any of the key figures from earlier stories.
Indeed, with one significant exception that we will turn to momentarily, it contains
almost no references to any named figures at all. The text instead consists of state-
ments about the movements of the Way and the implications of understanding these
movements. A typical line reads:
道常無為而無不為。
The Way constantly does nothing, yet nothing is not done. (Laozi, chapter 37)
As hinted at above, there is only one human subject that is mentioned in the entire
text. That subject is “I” 吾 – the author of the text:
致虛極,
Reach the extremity of emptiness,
守靜篤。
And hold fast to the firmity of stillness.
萬物並作,
The myriad things become active together,
吾以觀復。
And I thereby watch them return.

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夫物芸芸,
Things are teeming and multifarious,
各復歸其根。
But each returns to its root.
歸根曰靜。
Returning to the root is called stillness. (ibid. 16)
The author—Laozi—situates himself as one who watches the Way, understands
its movements, and is laying out that understanding to the readers of the text.
The text of the Laozi is thus a work as ambiguous and with as few (or fewer)
explicit subjects as the early poem with which we began. The text accordingly
becomes the object of the same kind of commentarial work that we have been
exploring with the poem above.
In the Xiang’er 想爾commentary to the Laozi,24 a commentary probably written
in the late second century of the common era,25 the “I” 吾 in the Laozi is re-read as
instead being the Way itself speaking. The commentary begins by quoting the lines
we just mentioned, and then explicates them:
“萬物並作, 吾以觀其復。夫物云云, 各歸其根。”萬物含道精, 並作, 初生
起時也。吾, 道也。觀其精復時, 皆歸其根, 故令人寳愼恨也。
“The myriad things become active together,
And I thereby watch them come back.
All of the things are teeming and multifarious,
But each returns to its root.”
The myriad things contain the essence of the Way. “Becoming active together”
refers to when they are first born and arise. “I” is the Way. When it watches the
essences [of the myriad things] come back [to it], they are “returning to their
root.” Thus, it commands people to treasure and be careful with their root.
(Xiang’er, 1979, lines 216-218)
The Way gave birth to the myriad things of the cosmos, and the Way watches this
emergence and subsequent return. The Way also took the form of Laozi in order to
write the text of the Laozi. The one human subject in the text—the “I” 吾—is thus
not a human subject at all.26 Laozi is simply an embodiment of the Way. And the
text of the Laozi is thus a direct revelation of the Way to humanity (Puett, 2016).
Not the most obvious reading. Which, of course, is part of its power.

24
The Xiang’er commentary was discovered at Dunhuang (S 6825). It is unfortunately only a portion of
the full text, consisting of commentary to chapters three through thirty-seven. The text is attributed in the
received tradition to either Zhang Daoling, who purportedly received revelations from the god Laozi in
142, or to his grandson Zhang Lu, who founded the Celestial Masters movement.
For excellent studies of the Xiang’er commentary, see Rao 1991; Ôfuchi Ninji 1991,1979; Bokenkamp
1993, 1997; Boltz 1982.
25
For helpful summaries of the scholarship on the dating of the Xiang’er commentary, see Bokenkamp
1997: 58–62; and Hendrichke 2000: 146.
26
Here the similarities with poetry composed in Sanskrit and Prakrit are palpable. In Kalidas’s
Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger) for instance, the speaking subject is the cloud—the difference
though is that the conjugated verb carries the information on number, tense, mood, and voice (though not
gender unlike in the vernacular languages).

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

When Buddhist texts start being translated into Chinese, the Laozi holds a privi-
leged place as one of the texts through which these translations are given. There
are many reasons for this, but certainly one such reason is that the Buddhist texts,
coming from a different source, also contained no references to earlier figures from
the Chinese tradition, no allusions to earlier texts in Chinese, and no re-framings of
earlier poems and anecdotes, all of which provides a perfect basis for the work of
substitutions and re-framings that we have come to know.
Let us turn to Sun Chuo, a figure from the fourth century. His Yudao lun喻道論is
a work aimed at translating Buddhism into the Chinese tradition.27 The entire argu-
ment works through substitutions. If Laozi can be the embodiment of the Way, so
can the Buddha:
夫佛也者、體道者也。
The Buddha is the embodiment of the Way. (Sun 2013: 147
The Buddha is simply an embodiment of the Way, precisely as the Xiang’er 想
爾commentary saw Laozi as an embodiment of the Way. And if the Buddha is the
embodiment of the Way, the Buddha can also be substituted for the Way as well.
Above, we quoted the following lines from the Laozi:
道常無為而無不為。
The Way constantly does nothing, yet nothing is not done. (Chapter 37)
The Yudao lun places the Buddha in the subject position of the same sentence. To
quote the sentences in full, beginning with the sentence quoted earlier:
夫佛也者、體道者也。道也者、導物者也。應感順通、無為而無不為者
也。
The Buddha is the embodiment of the Way. The Way is that which leads [more
literally: Ways] things. Responding and connecting, [the Buddha] does noth-
ing, yet nothing is not done. (Sun, 2013: 147)
The Buddha is substituted for Laozi, and the Buddha is also substituted for the
Way.
The play of substitutions, however, is not limited to Laozi:
周孔即佛、佛即周孔。蓋外内名之耳。
The Duke of Zhou and Confucius were the Buddha; the Buddha was the Duke of
Zhou and Confucius. These are merely outer and inner names. (Sun, 2013: 152)
We have seen above how the work of commentary involves a constant re-working
and re-framing by placing different figures into the positions mentioned in earlier
texts. A King Wen, as we noted, placed into the subject position of a poem that
was elsewhere read as a man separated from his lover, thus re-framing the entire
poem. In this case, the move is generalized: all references of the Duke of Zhou and
Confucius in the tradition are now being re-framed as being the Buddha, just as

27
On the Yudao Lun, see Link and Lee 1966. For studies of Sun Chuo more generally, see Xiaofei 2005
and Swartz 2018

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all references to the Way are being re-framed as the Buddha as well. The move re-
frames not just a poem but the entire earlier tradition.
If Confucius selected the poems of the Book of Songs, we should now read those
poems as having been selected by the Buddha. We not only read the subject posi-
tions of the poems differently, we now read the subject position of the editor differ-
ently as well.
As a final example of translation within this tradition, let us return to the opening
poem from the Book of Songs discussed above. And let us mention a rare moment
when a European translation of a Chinese text accurately built out of this tradition of
translation and commentary that we have been tracing.
The translator in question is an unlikely one for such praise: Ezra Pound.
From the point of view of providing an accurate translation of a poem from a
non-European language to a European one, Pound’s translation of the “Fishhawk”
poem is a clear failure. Pound knew no Chinese, and his translation (if that is even
the word) is based upon a dramatic poetic re-reading of earlier translations of the
poem into European languages. As our parenthetical comments note, to even call
this a translation strains the meaning of the word as it is typically used in English.28
However, from the point of view of the modes of interpretation and commentary
we have been tracing in the Chinese tradition, Pound’s reading works beautifully.
Much of the poetic ambiguity of the Chinese is lost, of course, as English requires
Pound to define subjects, tense, etc. But re-working the poem into the rhythms and
innuendos of twentieth century English opens up new possibilities in precisely the
same way (albeit by a different strategy) as that seen in the Chinese commentarial
readings. If it is a translation that fails in the way we usually use that term, it is a
reading that nonetheless puts powerfully into practice a mode of translation with
which we have become familiar in the Chinese tradition. Consider the poem in full:
“Hid! Hid!” the fish-hawk saith,
by Isle in Ho the fish-hawk saith:
“Dark and clear,
Dark and clear,
So shall be the prince’s fere.”
Clear as the stream her modesty;
As neath dark boughs her secrecy,
reed against reed
tall on slight
as the stream moves left and right,
dark and clear,
dark and clear.
To seek and not find
as a dream in his mind,

28
Scholarship on Pound’s translations of the Songs have understandably focused on Pound’s own poet-
ics and politics, particularly on his calls for a “Confucianism” in response to European modernity. For a
very helpful study of the development of Pound’s readings of Confucianism and the place of his transla-
tions within that development, see Cheadle 1997

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

think how her robe should be,

distantly, to toss and turn,
to toss and turn.
High reed caught in ts’ai grass
so deep her secrecy;
lute sound in lute sound is caught,
touching, passing, left and right.
Bang the gong of her delight. (Pound, 1954: 2)
Pound picks up many of the images from the poem—the island, the stream, the
weed grasses—and places them within a rhythm and rhyme scheme that charges the
movement of the poem and heightens the intensity of the separated lovers’ desire.
He also adds new images and terms as well—a favored technique in the commen-
tarial reading practices in China. In particular, the contrastive elements of dark and
clear become a defining motif that links the images with the characters in Pound’s
relentless rhythm. The poem opens with the fishhawk, in this version decidedly sin-
gular, whose calls define the dark and clear as the register within which the prince’s
desire will be operating. The dark and the clear then delineate the prince’s desire.
The modesty of his hoped-for mate is clear as the stream, while her secrecy is as if
beneath dark boughs. The images are thus connected both through the contrast and
through the incessant rhythm, marked again by the pounding refrain of “dark and
clear.” Only then do we get to the prince. New images are again brought in—his
dreams, her robe—and again connected through the persistent rhyme, rhythm, and
repetition to evoke the intensity of his longing. The poem concludes by linking the
imagery of the grasses and the music with the repetition of the verb “caught.” A
connection is finally forged through the music, but here less a joyous linking of the
two and more a sense of the prince finally—and perhaps only momentarily—captur-
ing an emotional response from his longed-for mate. Through the introduction of
new images, rhythms, and repetitions, Pound moves the poem into a distinctive reg-
ister of intensity and emotional turmoil. The movement of the poem into twentieth
century English allows for yet new possibilities to be opened—exactly the mode of
working we have seen throughout the commentarial readings. For Pound, it was not
the Buddha who selected the poems for the Book of Songs. It was Confucius. But we
now have a very different Confucius, and a very different poem. And one that can be
read fully within the work of commentary and translation we have seen developing
in the Chinese tradition.
The work of commentary is one of endlessly opening possibilities by shifting
perspectives, re-working tense, altering the gender and number of specific figures,
and reading lines from the point of view of different possible speakers. The work of
commentary is the work of translation, and vice versa.
A further implication of this is that commentary and translation are ubiquitous
activities. In a world without these activities (the world Xu Shen invokes in terms
of what putatively would have existed before Fu Xi and Cang Jie), the danger, from
the point of view articulated here, is that one might come to accept a given set of

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patterns one finds oneself in as simply being the world. The work of translation, of
commentary, and of interpretation is the work of opening possibilities. And it is the
same sort of work one finds in divination and ritual of imagining oneself in a world
arranged differently.
Translation is thus the same kind of work as that of commentary. And both are
simply doing in a particular register what one is regularly doing all the time. We are
constantly shifting our perspective, re-framing our understandings, re-interpreting a
given action. Translation and commentary are simply modes of being in the world.

Concluding Thoughts: Home and Elsewhere

In an essay on ontological relativity, Quine (1969) famously argued that “radi-

cal translation” begins at home. By this phrase, he meant that one does not only
encounter difficulties matching words to things when one is in foreign lands, but
that the vulnerability of meaning and reference is also revealed in the “dimness
of reference” in our ordinary lives. Quine’s signature example (see Quine, 2013)
illustrates this difficulty through a thought experiment. If a rabbit scoots by and an
interlocutor, speaking a language I have never heard, utters the word “gavagai,” how
would I know whether the reference was to the speed, to the color of the rabbit, to
the whole rabbit, or to one of its parts? Perhaps we should not attach any salva-
tional importance to this example, because while Quine is right that referent is not
determinant, the philosophical trick is to disallow the context, the accompanying
gestures, and the possibility of the next steps within the experiment, which almost
predetermines what the results will be.29 In any case, despite the many problems
with Quine’s thought experiment, his rejection of both relativism and a universal-
ism that assumes a common kernel of truth in all societies that is simply dressed in
different expressions, is still valuable (Laugier, 2001). The room for misunderstand-
ings, accidents, and misfires is always there in any region of language but that is no
reason to think that cultures are locked behind iron curtains of incommunicability.
Austin’s (1957) wonderful essay on excuses captures the variety of ways in which
our actions and our expressions—what we do with words—can fail us or we can fail
them (Laugier, 2020). So why is this possibility considered somehow special to the
act of translation?
One thought that motivated us in starting this project was to ask what it is to
begin at home? Is translation and the notorious problems of misconstruing the
meaning of words or what they refer to, a unique problem arising out of a world in
which encounters among different languages has become intensified? Or is it the
case that translation belongs to a family of activities that includes interpretation,
commentary, communication, and projection, among the many things humans do as

29
On this point, see also Hanks and Severi (2015) who point out even in the “radical” case, the linguist
would be able to avail themselves of other kinds of contextual information and resources. For them, start-
ing from translation as an actual practice in the world helps avoid these pitfalls. And yet, from our point
of view, one wonders when they say that translation is universal, one begs the question as to what picture
is it that one has of translation?

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Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

they live their lives in language? And do these issues lead us to ask if there are dif-
ferent ways in which societies imagine what it is to be in language and how they see
movements of various kinds within and across languages as related, as joining what
they see as natural and what they see as social to be braided into each other? As
Jocelyn Benoist puts the matter, citing Wittgenstein, judgments whether something
is true or false are not made over a proposition taken in isolation but presuppose a
sense of harmony between language and reality in terms of an agreement in a form
of life, and not simply an agreement in opinions. “Il est accord dans et non accord
sur” (“It is agreement in and not agreement on”, Benoist, 2018:47) and this agree-
ment is not just expressed through signing of papers in magisterial court rooms and
churches but covers the wide range of human expressions relating to what human
beings do—eat, cry, laugh, sleep—but also make calculations, learn calculus, and
one might add, comment, translate, argue (Benoist, 2018). How does this vision of
harmony relate to the facts of multiplicity of languages and the heterogeneous net-
works of words that Cassin and her colleagues explicated in each entry of the Dic-
tionary of Untranslatables? Beginning from the examples we offered in this paper,
one tantalizing question might be how different would such a project look if it took
say sentences rather than words as entries?
From this vantage point, Quine’s question could be restated as follows: given the
dimness of reference, how does this expanded notion of harmony between thought
and language guide us to imagine how one makes sense of words and phrases that
are unfamiliar, encountered for the first time, as it were? Quine himself had sug-
gested that familiarity of sounds might play a crucial role in making different lan-
guages understandable to each other thereby generating a classification of languages
that are proximate and those that are distant. On the face of it, this classification has
an appeal. After all, in societies like India where we have evidence that people spoke
multiple languages and any texts such as those in Sanskrit drama were composed in
both Sanskrit and a variety of Prakrits because different actors representing charac-
ters from different places spoke different languages on stage, would it not be easier
to think of translation (and indeed mistranslation) as more of a normal human activ-
ity in which synonyms are more like transfigurations of the same word?30 Quine is
imagining a context in which deciphering an unknown word is happening when an
explorer is encountering a hereby untouched (untouched by Europeans, Quine seems
to mean) culture and hence cannot depend upon mediators. But is the proximity of
sounds the best way to think of this proximity and distance?

30
In his path-breaking study of the language order in which Sanskrit and Prakrit emerged as literary
languages, Ollett (2017) makes the case for treating Sanskrit and Prakrit as jointly serving the parameters
of textual production in the literary and intellectual culture of India from the first to twelfth centuries CE.
All this is correct, yet this does not settle the questions of proximity and distance, which depended on
context. For instance, translations of Sanskrit drama such as Abhigyan Shakuntalam by European schol-
ars paid little attention to the Prakrit verses and relied instead on the translations in Chaya Sanskrit (shad-
owed in Sanskrit) of these verses arguing that Prakrit was harder to understand (see Figueira, 1991, who
notes this feature of translations of this text in European languages).

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As we started to investigate the vision of what language is, taking what

scholars (across time) had written on these matters in Indian and Chinese tradi-
tions we did not know if the relation between these traditions would turn out to
be that of proximity or distance but we were interested in seeing how human
actions and expressions were theorized in the context of language as use, or,
for that matter, what in the first place, counted as theory in the way these ques-
tions were posed? What did give us some confidence in our project was the
fact that there was a rich archive of commentaries on the texts, contests over
interpretations on both traditions, and translations of texts within and among
different regions of India, China, and Tibet that went back to centuries of intel-
lectual and physical labor of memorizing texts, inscribing and copying them,
writing commentaries, illustrating them, and in some cases publishing them.
These archives were clear testimony to the fact that the activities of translation
and interpretation were never seen as projects that could be completed once and
for all. In the last section that looks at the interpretations and translations of the
Guan Ju poem, fidelity to the poem in the centuries of commentaries is seen,
not in producing one authoritative version, but in allowing different perspec-
tives to emerge from within the poem. In contrast, the Laozi, standing as an
exception to the commentarial tradition, does something else with possibility. It
uses what might be recognized in the semiotic tradition as metonymy (Laozi is
the embodiment of the way) and the metaphor—if Laozi is the embodiment of
the way, the Buddha can replace Laozi as the embodiment of the way. If in the
first case it is the indeterminacy of subject, in the second case the substitution
reveals something more about the nature of the subject by the suggestion that
Buddha and Laozi are simply the inner and outer names of the same way.31 So
from these perspectives, Pound’s translation might expand possibility through
his imagination of what it is to seek and to explore what it is to find harmony
between thought and world in such experiments. Proximity to Buddhism in
China was not a given—but there was some resonance in Buddhism and in Chi-
nese traditions of commentary and translation that could bear the vulnerability
of each to the other. Bhatti in his Battikavya was stretching the tradition and
taking great risks in taking the normativity of grammar and bending it to give
his reader a slightly different experience of the character of Rāvaṇa—that might
still grow in the experiments of a film maker such as Avikuntak who in his sin-
gle shot film Rati Chakravyuh materializes Sītā’s equal longing for her husband
Rama and the king Rāvaṇa, who courted destruction in his love for her.
We have felt a curious sense of elation in the realization that just as the author
presages his or her own death in the readiness to leave (abandon, Cavell will say)
their words to others, so commentators and translators relied in the community of
present and future readers for correcting their errors. Jonathan Gold (2008) makes
this point very elegantly for Tibetan translations through which Buddhist texts that

31
It is worth noting here that Buddhism did not come into China in one single wave so if there were
errors in earlier versions of texts coming from mispronunciations or errors in matching sounds to charac-
ters, it is fascinating to see how grievous were some errors as compared to others.

13
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

had been lost were recreated in Tibetan. Despite the kind of errors they were sus-
ceptible to making, the faith that these errors would be corrected in the future was
sustained. There is also detailed work now on what was entailed in the translation
process itself as teams of translators committed to memory the Buddhist texts from
regions such as Gandhar and who then traveled through Central Asia communicat-
ing these texts to spread the Buddhist sutras, before they reached China. The pro-
cesses through which the phonetic transcriptions of these texts composed in Sanskrit
or mixed Prakrits were finally rendered in early Chinese characters makes for a fas-
cinating history (see Boucher, 1998, 2017, and the impressive literature he surveys).
The point we want to stress is that when Europeanists write as if translation is an
activity that was first problematized in the encounter of Europe and the “Orient,”
they manage to ignore centuries of history made elsewhere in which already the
questions of translation were embedded in a whole family of activities that we can
learn from by the very simple act of asking what were their puzzles?
In the case of Sanskrit, the puzzle seemed to be that in a verb-oriented lan-
guage how to understand action within the confines of a sentence and hence what
is agency in language? The linguistic apparatus it brings to bear on this question
is that of grammar and particularly the role of kãraka categories, the event mak-
ers in the sentence. In addition to looking at the rules and definitions, we might
also look at the examples. We want to highlight the importance of the fact that
the examples of kãrakas in Panini and his commentators are ever so quotidian:
“Chaitra is cooking”; “Rama is going to the village”; “The leaf is falling from the
tree.” The grammatical rules governing the kãrakas in these cases are not only
about correct speech but also about such questions as the relations among dif-
ferent event makers, the rising of agentive capacity in say, the instrument, or the
location and so on. Equally significant is the fact that a grammatical puzzle is
often raised because there are expressions that are found to be in use among the
people, such as “the cooking pot cooks” that are seen to be in need of explanation
and in turn lead to profound reflections on the agentive capacities of both animate
and inanimate beings.
In the case of Chinese, the appeal to the ordinary is of a different order. The har-
mony between thought and the world here is not because an underlying rule can be
deciphered but because an underlying pattern can be found. One might say, at the
risk of losing some nuance, that in the case of Sanskrit, the activity of the expert
in relation to ordinary language is finding harmony in being able to fit a grammati-
cal rule to sentences found through usage, whereas for the Chinese sage it is being
able to divine a pattern in the activities of humans and non-humans (the footprints
of a leopard, the flight path of herons) that lead to new developments from pattern
to character, from character to writing. Yet as successive steps are laid out, from
trigram to hexagram and from hexagram to writing, the developments come to be
seen as part of the progression of the institution of good governance from ways of
improving record keeping to bringing different kinds of activities under regulation.
Yet writing is explicitly defined as the opening of possibility and is characterized as
an activity in the genre of “as if.” Does any of this connect with the concerns with
agency and the distribution of agentive capacities between humans and nonhumans?

13
 A. Brandel et al.

We want to note two things here. First, while tense, gender, and number are
strongly marked in Sanskrit for both verbs and nouns, how this information is to
be used in the sentence is different. In the case of verbs, that information can mean
that the agent (kartā) and object have already been expressed and hence block the
vibhakti attached to the nominal terms from carrying any information about their
agentive or other capacities. The power of the verb in the sentence is evident in the
fact that even objects can be bestowed with agentive capacity on the strength of the
conjugation of the verb. In the case of classical Chinese, it might at first sight seem
that grammar plays a much less decisive role in determining the function of different
words in the sentence, but the very withdrawal of grammar to give information on
number (singular or plural), gender; and even more importantly to leave the subject
and object to remain unspecified allows for the sentence to emerge as a different
kind of entity than it is in Sanskrit. This difference is most powerfully expressed in
the fact that one can have shifts of perspective in the same sentence, as in a whole
text such as in the poem Guang ju, where depending on how one chooses to mark
the subject or object of the verbs—the mood of the poem, as we have argued com-
pletely changes. It then becomes the task of the commentators to determine whether
the poem refers to the present or to the past, are there two birds calling to each other
or is there only one whose cry is being heard, are we permitted to add “crying” to
describe their call, and thus the endless proliferation of possibilities. The sparseness
of the writing, and the words strewn around as if stranded, allows us to see in con-
crete terms what is meant when writing is described in terms of “as if.”
One has to remember that Panini’s grammar too was written in the form of
truly sparse and condensed sūtras. “kartā svatantrah” (lit. agent free) then had to
be expanded through the commentaries to delineate if svatantra is the one who is
unconstrained, or is it the same as dominance? In both cases, what grammar does in
either developing an architecture of rules or of patterns, either expanding its domain
or withdrawing to make room for expansion of perspectives, is to define the possi-
bilities of the directions of projection, sometimes to trouble the apparent obviousness
of human actions and expressions. For instance, is going to the village the same as
going to the village in one’s mind? This becomes a grammatical question when the
rule specifies that in the latter case the village is to be put in the dative case and not
the accusative case, for the village is not the direct object of the action of movement,
it is an indirect object, (rather than imagining the village, he is going there through
the mediation of the mind). Perhaps one could venture the suggestion that the kãraka
kãraka apparatus helps the grammarian to bring such troubles with our expressions to
the surface of thought, while in the Chinese case it is the fact that perspectives can be
continuously shifted within a sentence or a poem that one can find that grammatical
indetermination itself becomes the source of expansion of possibility.
If such are the indeterminacies within which acts of commenting and interpret-
ing are embedded, one can imagine how much theoretical labor went into asking
such questions as how to think of the relation between the oral/aural atmosphere of
a text, the transcription of sounds into characters in Chinese, and the publication of
the text. But the risks of errors were taken as part of the normal commerce of life and
were perhaps not so different when a poem was being rendered by shifting the subject
from whose perspective it was to be read and when a travel weary monk in search of

13
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere

the dharma was reciting a text committed to memory, but without the knowledge of
the grammatical rules that governed it in the Gandhar region of the Kushan Empire.
Gold’s subtle recounting of the inevitability of errors in translation and recreation of
lost texts in the Tibetan Buddhist world is worth citing as a provisional ending:
“Then Sa-pan entertains an objection: If the morphological constructions are
not made in this way [i.e. according to Sanskrit rules], how is one to under-
stand the meaning of a Sanskrit expression from a translation into Tibetan?
The question asks, essentially, how can one language’s meaning be understood
in another’s syntax? In answer to this question, sa-pan first gives several exam-
ples of loss in translation between Sanskrit and Tibetan that he sees as both
inevitable and unproblematic, and then he argues that, in fact, strong theories
of untranslatability are non-Buddhist” (Gold, 2008:37).
We had started with the hope that looking at language in flight would work to
bring different aspects of translation into focus as one of the activities we do with
texts. But letting these texts on grammar and poetry shape our understanding of
what the kinds of issues were that bothered grammarians, or poets, or commen-
tators, we realized that it was not just that different elements of language were in
movement but that movement itself was what stimulated thoughts on topics such as
what was agency, what was capacity, how did one know who was the subject of an
experience? Rice being stirred, fire burning and being extinguished, a leaf falling
from a tree, a man going to his village, a road being traveled upon, leopards leav-
ing footprints, birds taking flight, two birds calling each other, two lovers longing
to call each other, tossing and turning because you can seek and not find—all these
activities left the traces that made landscapes the moving grounds for humans to
find expressions, become examples for grammar and for writing to emerge. Such is
the vision of language we found in which proximity and distance in languages is the
result of work and the ability to bear failures and start again.

Declarations
Conflict of Interest The authors declare no competing interests.

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