________________
ETERNITY OR OTHERWISE OF A WORD
163
a letter is non-eternal because two pronunciations of it are two seats of the 'universal' concerned we can understand why he approvingly quotes Uddyotakara who argues : “A word is non-eternal, because it is possessed of a ‘universal' and is an object of sensory cognition, like a jar."96 But Kumārila has taunted : "The features like 'possessing a universal', 'being an object of sensory cognition' etc. belong to whatever is a real entity, and one inferring from them the non-eternity of a word must be no logician"; this evokes the following protest from the side of Jayanta : “This can be said only by one who does not know what it is to be a logician. As for an irrelevant probans here is an example : 'The word "cow” pronounced yesterday exists even today, because it is an object of the cognition-grasping-the-word-“cow”, like the word "cow” grasped today'. Certainly, the feature 'being an object of a cognition' belongs to whatever is a real entity, and it has nothing to do with whether an entity is eternal or non-eternal. Thus on the one hand you yourself declare that a probans like this is an irrelevant probans, on the other hand you yourself offer such a probans. What is all this ?**97 Meanwhile, Jayanta has argued that a sound is to be proved to be a quality of sky in the very same manner in which desire, aversion etc. are proved to be a quality of a soul.98 This last phase of Jayanta's argumentation pertaining to the nature of a word too deserves some consideration. Thus the Mīmāmsaka's thesis that a word is an eternal ubiquitous entity was certainly misconceived, but his understanding of how air plays a role in auditory cognition was essentially sound; (still more sound seems to have been Sikṣāspecialists' view which was above referred to in passing and according to which a word itself is of the form of air). So on this count it is rather Jayanta's criticism of the Mīmāṁsaka which is essentially misconceived. Rightly convinced that a word is actually produced (and not just made manifest) at the time of being spoken but failing to see how it can have anything to do with air which is no object of auditory cognition the Nyāya-Vaiseșika authors developed a highly imaginary hypothesis according to which a word at the time of being spoken is produced in the form of a momentary quality of an eternal ubiquitous sky and propagated in a wave-like fashion from the speaker's mouth upto the hearer's ear which itself is of the form of sky-confined-withinthe-ear-drum. As formulated in terms of the fundamental ontological
