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310 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY former, it is necessary to distinguish first between varņa and dhvani. A varna is an articulate sound. It is conceived as integral (niravayava) and omnipresent (sarva-gata) and therefore also eternal (nitya). That a varna can be uttered several times or in several ways does not mean that there are as many particular cases of it with a universal running through them. What thus diversify it are its accidental features; and, however much they may change, a varna remains the same. One of the important arguments adduced in support of its permanence is the ready recognition we have when the same varna is uttered more than once, which implies that all those utterances refer but to an identical thing. We say for example that the a-sound is uttered ten times and not that ten a-sounds are uttered. If they did not refer to the same the recognition would have to be explained -without adequate reason for doing so-as an illusion, no identity being possible between the fleeting utterances themselves. The latter, viz. dhvani, is viewed as the means of manifesting the varna which has all along been there, and it may be compared to the written symbol, the chief difference being that, when there are several varņas, we have a temporal series of utterances in the one case, but a spatial series of written signs in the other. The variety of ways in which a varna may be uttered, as e.g. with different stresses, is explained as due to differences in this means of utterance. The nature of dhvani is explained in alternative ways, but we need not enter here into a discussion of such details. It is enough for our purpose to regard it as 'tone' which, as the means of revealing varnas, must be different from them. It is also transient and limited to the place where it is heard. A 'word' (sabda) is two or more of these varņas, and is regarded as merely an aggregate (samudāya) and not as a whole (avayavin) distinguishable from each of its constituent parts and from all of them. But yet the necessity is recognized in the case of every word for the varnas in it occurring in a specific order; for otherwise words like dina pitiful') and nadi ('river'), which consist of the same varnas but placed in a different order, would not differ in their connotation. This order, however, can refer only to their manifestation
