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Bharthari's paradox
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well aware of their problematic status in connection with names and other denoting expressions
Our text consists of the opening verses of the sambandha. samuddeśa (SS) which is part of the third Chapter of Bhartrhari's Vāk yapadiya (VP). VP is a treatise on Grammar, the science on which the interpretation of the Vedas depends. The topic of SS is the power of words to convey their meanings and one of its themes is the doctrine that this power is no less "eternal" and "unchanging" than the Vedic injunctions themselves. In the course of discussing this theme, Bhartshari devotes some verses to the problem of using language to speek about its own fundamental powers.
The first verse of our text mentions several thingss and then coniments on "their relation 2 :
From words wbich are uttered, the speaker's idea, an external object and the form of the word itself are understood. Their relation is fixed.
(SS 1) This bighly comprehensive and so far nameless relation is Bhartshari's primary candidate for something unnameable. He explicitly says that it cannot be signified in a certain way (svadharamena = on the basis of a property belonging to it). The main exegetical question is whether or not Bhartịhari's semantic theory affords any alternative way of naming or signifying the relation in question. And, short of a full-scale reconstruction of that theory, as expounded throughout the nearly two thousand verses of the Vāk yapadiya, it seems to be very difficult to settle that question in any definitive way. The problem is compounded by several difficulties of reconciling Bhartshari's linguistic practice with his own linguistic theory. For he uses various linguistic devices to identify and denote the relation in question; and it is by no means clear how his own linguistic theory could accomodate some of those devices.
The relation in question connects "words" with “meaning”, where each of these two terms covers a heterogeneous SP-36
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