________________
that words refer to a metaphorical reality (aupacariki sattā), which is different from absolute reality. He adds: "Metaphorical reality shows the own form of all things in all their states." "In all their states" probably means in the past, present and future In other words, the word "pot" in "the pot comes into being refers to the meta- phorical existence of the pot, which shows it in its future state; or, more simply, although perhaps less accurately, it refers to the future pot.
Bharthari's fourth solution, finally, is as simple as it is obvious: the word "pot refers to a mental reality, that is, to the pot that is in my mind (that I have in mind. when I pronounce the statement the pot comes into being." This final solution is so obvious, one would think, that one wonders why Bharthari has not offered it right from the beginning and, indeed, why others before him had not hit upon this solu- tion much earlier. This peculiar absence may have to be explained by the fact that the thinkers I have mentioned so far were very concerned about distinguishing themselves from the idealistic concepts that were gaining influence at that time in some schools of Indian philosophy.
Having briefly considered the four solutions offered by Bharthari to the problem connected with the coming into being of a pot, you may wish to know which of these four is Bharthari's own. To my knowledge the Vakyapadiya contains nothing that would allow us to make such a choice. And indeed, it seems that Bhartrhari did not express, and may not have had, any preference. This is the peculiar feature of his philosophical writings, which the Dutch scholar Jan Houben has called Bharthari's
rent positions are correct from different points of view. This should not be taken to imply that Bharthari had no philosophy of his own and that all he does is present various points of view without choosing between them. It seems quite clear that Bharthari has drawn at least one very clear, and im portant, conclusion from his various lucubrations about pots that do or do not come into being namely that phenomenal reality is unreal, and different from absolute reality. Bharthari's conclusion is in one important respect different from the one drawn by Nagarjuna. The latter, if Claus Oetke's analyses are correct, had come to the conclusion that nothing exists, nothing is absolutely real. Bharthari agrees that phenomenal reality is unreal, but differs from Nagarjuna in claiming that there is another reality that is real. After our reflections about the coming into being of the pot, it goes without saying that absolute reality for Bharthari does not come into being, and indeed does not change.
Bharthari's concept of absolute reality is interesting, especially if one contrasts it with the position of many Buddhists of his time and before him. Those Buddhists claimed that the objects of the phenomenal world cannot be real, because they are composite. These composite objects are in the end nothing but words that is to say phenomenal reality is in the end nothing but a trick played upon us by language Bharthari agrees with the last statement. Phenomenal reality is indeed the result of language, but language does not combine the ultimately real constituents (as some Buddhists believed). On the contrary, it divides the ultimately real totality of all there is, which is absolute reality.
Bharthari here introduces the notion that a whole, a totality, can be more real
than its parts. This sounds at first rather strange, but here his background in grammar and linguistics came to his help. It is a well-known fact, noted by thinkers long before Bharthari, that a word in language is more than the mere accumulation of the sounds that constitute it. Some Buddhist thinkers had, perhaps for this very reason postulated, already before the beginning of the common era, that words are entities that are different from their constituent sounds. They had claimed the same for whole sentences, which are more than the combination of the words that constitute them. The important grammarian Patanjali (ca. 150 B.C.E.), too, had made similar claims with regard to words. Here, then, Bharthari found examples of objects that are more than their combined constituents. Words are more than their constituent sounds, and sentences are more than the words in them. Strictly speaking, sounds are not parts of words, because the latter are altogether different entities, and words are not parts of sentences that, once again, are different entities. It is in this context that Bharthari brings in the example of the peacock's egg, mentioned in the title of this essay. The word, which in itself has no parts and no sequence, unfolds itself so as to give rise to something that appears to have both just as the vital essence (rasa) of a peacock's egg, which does not possess the variety of colors of a peacock, unfolds itself so as to give rise to a peacock that does. Bharthari generalizes this idea, and claims, for example, that pots, too, have no parts.
For Bharthari, then, the world, and each object in it, has two aspects: the one real, the other unreal. Vakyapadiya 3.1.32, for example, speaks of the real and the unreal parts that are present in each thing. The phenomenal world is unreal. It is the result of an (unreal) division of the undivided absolute." The essential reality of things, we read elsewhere in the Vakyapadiya, is beyond differentiation: "With regard to things (bhava), whose reality is beyond differentiation (vikalpatīta, the world is followed in linguistic expressions (vyavahăra) that are based on conventions sanketa)." Here it is stated that linguistic expressions correspond to the unreal divisions of reality. Another verse tells us more about the division at stake here: Heaven, earth, wind, sun, oceans, rivers, the directions, these are divisions of the reality belonging to the inner organ, leven though they are situated outside it." Note that this verse does not prove that Bharthari was an idealist, that he denied the
existence of the outside world. It states rather that the divisions of the outside world a re produced by the inner organ, and therefore by words, as we shall see.
Words separate things from each other: "By force of the fact that understanding has the form of wordsl, every produced thing is distinguished from other thingsl."!! Words are the only basis of the nature of things and of their use." It follows that those who know the nature of things see the power of words." Bharthari elaboabes on the power of words in the following verses: "The power residing in words is the basis of this whole universe.... Since the difference between sadja and other nusical notes is perceived (only when explained by words, all categories of
bjects are based on the measures of words." 14 The creative power of language is Semplified by the illusion of a circle created by a firebrand turned around: "It is Observed in the case of a torch-wheel et cetera, that the form of an object is per peved on account of words (šruti), even though the basis lof the perception is
Philosophy East & West
Johannes Hronkhorst
