Page Text
________________
that lacks precision; rather, it is our knowledge of the expression he uses that needs to be widened. Similarly, if parvata stands for an ascetic haunting mountains or caves and having a wild, frightening, or repulsive appearance, we can see how a brahma-rakşas came to be associated with the verse as a benefactor of Candra. I should also point out that the use of the ablative parvatāt in 486 somehow seems more natural in the case of a sentient source of acquisition than in the case of a location. If the author of 486 intended to give us the location of the acquisition made by Candrācārya, would he not have used the locative form parvate?40 These observations should explain why we cannot absolutely exclude the possibility of parvata being a reference to a person.
6.2 The word parvata in the sense elucidated just now could be a variant or a corrupt form of a secondary (taddhita) derivative pārvata. Indications available in the Kāśikā, Nyāsa, and Pada-manjarī on Pāṇini 2.4.23, 3.2.53, and 4.2.144 suggest that there was an older commentarial tradition according to which the word amanusya occurring in Pāṇini did not convey a literal or etymological (yaugika) meaning of the form 'anything or anyone other than a human being but a specific conventional (rūdha) meaning like 'a rakşas, piśāca, etc.', that is, 'a member of a species thought to be similar to humans, but having strange capacities'. If this is so, one early, if not exclusive, understanding of pārvata (and parvatīya) derived by Pāņini 4.2.144, vibhāṣāmanuşye, must have been something like 'a person of extraordinary or miraculous capacities associated with a mountain'. The probability that the pre-Kāśikā
19
| SR No. | 269664 |
| Book Title | Paninian Studies |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Ashok Aklujkar |
| Publisher | Ashok Aklujkar |
| Publication Year | |
| Total Pages | 47 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Article |
| File Size | 4 MB |