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grammarians, but also their own phoneticians; and it is therefore not impossible that the Siksa-author referred to here in the Vṛtti was a Jaina phonetician. Yet, from a remark at the end of the Vṛtti on 1.110 one would infer that the Vṛtti was only referring to Sikṣā-s belonging to different Vedic schools (VP I:177:5, ityevamādi pratisākham...), at least in the passage from bahudhā sikṣāsūtrakārabhāṣyakāramatani dṛśsyante (VP I:175.5-6) onward. (The two verses VP 1.113-114 need not be included in the reference ityevamādi pratiśākham...) Moreover, different kārikās speak of sound as something that can be accumulated and diffused (VP 1.106, 108; 3.9.63-64), even though this is only seemingly so from the point of view of the permanent Sabda or sphota, nothing indicates that Bhartṛhari would here refer to a view of the Jainas. The Vṛtti on 1.48 speaks suddenly (i.e. without specific indication in the kärikä) of a 'subtle pervading sound' (sükṣme vyāpini dhvanau) which is accumulated like a cloud-mass.
2.5 It may therefore be that also among the Brahmanical authors, for instance authors of Sikṣā-s, there were some who worked with a theory of subtle, material sound and speech. Among the important philosophical systems, it was Särhkhya which considered audible sound a derivative of Sabdatanmatra, the subtle element of sound.20 In Samkhya, however, the atoms are specific, unlike the atoms in at least the first of the two verses in the Vṛtti on kärikā 1.110; this verse is, as we have seen, remarkably close to the TS. Whatever we have to think of other places where Bhartṛhari refers to a view according to which sound is made of atoms, the emphatic denial that these verses refer to Jaina ideas (Sharma, 1977:13, 17) is without any reasonable basis.21 If the atom-view in kärikä 1.110 is correctly illustrated by the two
20
Nāgesa explained the anu-s which transform into sabda as Sabdatanmātrādi, thus suggesting that they referred to a Samkhya-view (Nageśa's Uddyota on Kaiyata's Pradipa on the MBh on P. 1.4.29).
21
(a)
According to Sharma's confused argumentation on pp. 11-12, the two verses do not refer to the Samkhya view because the atoms are of a single general nature (have the same jāti, universal) and transform into different specific entities (including sabda) according to the first verse, and they cannot refer to the Jaina-view because they are specifically called Sabda according to the second verse. However, atoms that are accepted to be of a single general nature, and transform into shadow, etc., are indeed very much in accordance with the Jaina view. The verse in which they are called sabda could refer to a different view (note 19), or rather, as explained in section 2.3, it should be interpreted both in accordance with the first verse according to which one type of atom has all
Jan E.M. Houben, Pune, March 1994 (pre-final version)
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